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GREEK STUDIES 



A SERIES OF ESSAYS 



BY 

WALTER PATER 

LATE FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE 



PREPARED FOR THE PRESS 
BY 

CHARLES L. SHADWELL 

♦ 

FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND LONDON 
189s 

All rights reserved 









Copyright, 1894, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



^^»h»^ 



J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 
Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 



V 



PREFACE 



The present volume consists of a collection of essays 
by the late Mr. Pater, all of which have already been 
given to the public in various Magazines ; and it is 
owing to the kindness of the several proprietors of 
those Magazines that they can now be brought 
together in a collected shape. It will, it is believed, 
be felt, that their value is considerably enhanced by 
their appearance in a single volume, where they can 
throw light upon one another, and exhibit by their 
connexion a more complete view of the scope and 
purpose of Mr. Pater in dealing with the art and 
literature of the ancient world. 

The essays fall into two distinct groups, one dealing 
with the subjects of Greek mythology and Greek 
poetry, the other with the history of Greek sculpture 
and Greek architecture. But these two groups are 
not wholly distinct ; they mutually illustrate one 

V 



vi PREFACE 

another, and serve to enforce Mr. Pater's conception 
of the essential unity, in all its many-sidedness, of 
the Greek character. The god understood as the 
" spiritual form " of the things of nature is not only the 
key-note of the " Study of Dionysus ^ '' and " The Myth 
of Demeter and Persephone^", but reappears as con- 
tributing to the interpretation of the growth of Greek 
sculpture^." Thus, though in the bibliography of 
his writings, the two groups are separated by a con- 
siderable interval, there is no change of view ; he had 
already reached the centre of the problem, and, the 
secret once gained, his mode of treatment of the dif- 
ferent aspects of Greek life and thought is permanent 
and consistent. 

The essay on ^^The Myth of Demeter and Per- 
sephone " was originally prepared as two lectures, for 
delivery, in 1875, ^^ ^^^ Birmingham and Midland 
Institute. These lectures were published in the 
Fortnightly Review, in Jan. and Feb. 1876. The 
^' Study of Dionysus" appeared in the same Review 
in Dec. 1876. "The Bacchanals of Euripides" must 
have been written about the same time, as a sequel 
to the " Study of Dionysus "; for, in 1878, Mr. Pater 
revised the four essays, with the intention, apparently, 

1 See p. 28. 2 See p. 100. 

^ See pp. 231, 269. 



PREFACE vii 

of publishing them collectively in a volume, an inten- 
tion afterwards abandoned. The text now printed 
has, except that of '^ The Bacchanals ", been taken from 
proofs then set up, further corrected in manuscript. 
"The Bacchanals ", written long before, was not pub- 
Hshed until 1889, when it appeared in Macmillan' s 
Magazine for May. It was reprinted, without altera- 
tion, prefixed to Dr. Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchae, 
'' Hippolytus Veiled " first appeared in August 1889, 
in Macmillan' s Magazine. It was afterwards re- 
written, but with only a few substantial alterations, 
in Mr. Pater's own hand, with a view, probably, of 
republishing it with other essays. This last revise 
has been followed in the text now printed. 

The papers on Greek sculpture ^ are all that remain 
of a series which, if Mr. Pater had lived, would, 
probably, have grown into a still more important 
work. Such a work would have included one or 
more essays on Pheidias and the Parthenon, of which 
only a fragment, though an important fragment, can 
be found amongst his papers ; and it was to have 

1 " The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture " was published in the 
Fortjiightly Review, Feb. and March, 1880; "The Marbles 
of ^gina " in the same Review in April. " The Age of 
Athletic Prizemen " was published in the Conteinporary 
Review in February of the present year. 



viii PREFACE 

been prefaced by an Introduction to Greek Studies, 
only a page or two of which was ever written. 

This is not the place to speak of Mr. Pater^s private 
virtues, the personal charm of his character, the 
brightness of his talk, the warmth of his friendship, 
the devotion of his family life. But a few words may 
be permitted on the value of the work by which he 
will be known to those who never saw him. 

Persons only superficially acquainted, or by hearsay, 
with his writings, are apt to sum up his merits as 
a writer by saying that he was a master, or a con- 
summate master of style ; but those who have really 
studied what he wrote do not need to be told that his 
distinction does not lie in his literary grace alone, his 
fastidious choice of language, his power of word- 
painting, but in the depth and seriousness of his 
studies. That the amount he has produced, in a 
literary life of thirty years, is not greater, is one 
proof among many of the spirit in which he worked. 
His genius was " an infinite capacity for taking pains ". 
That ^ delicacy of insight, that gift of penetrating into 
the heart of things, that subtleness of interpretation, 
which with him seems an instinct, is the outcome of 
hard, patient, conscientious study. If he had chosen, 
he might, without difficulty, have produced a far 
greater body of work of less value ; and from a 



PREFACE 



IX 



worldly point of view, he would have been wise. 
Such was not his understanding of the use of his 
talents. Cui multuni datum est, multum quaeretur ab 
eo. Those who wish to understand the spirit in 
which he worked, will find it in this volume. 

C. L. S. 

Oct. 1894. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

A STUDY OF DIONYSUS: THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF 

FIRE AND DEW o I 

THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES ... o 49 
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE. 

1 80 

II 115 

HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES . 1 57 
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE. 

I. THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART . -195 

II. THE AGE OF GRAVEN LVIAGES . . . 236 

THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 266 

THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN: A CHAPTER IN 

GREEK ART 286 

xi 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 



THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW 

Writers on mythology speak habitually of the 
religion of the Greeks. In this speaking, they are 
really using a misleading expression, and should speak 
rather of 7'eligions ; each race and class of Greeks — 
the Dorians, the people of the coast, the fishers — 
having had a religion of its own, conceived of the 
objects that came nearest to it and were most in its 
thoughts, and the resulting usages and ideas never 
having come to have a precisely harmonised system, 
after the analogy of some other religions. The religion 
of Dionysus is the religion of people who pass their 
lives among the vines. As the rehgion of Demeter 
carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads of 
Greece, and places us, in fancy, among a primitive 
race, in the furrow and beside the granary; so the 
religion of Dionysus carries us back to its vineyards, 
B 1 



2- A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

and is a monument of the ways and thoughts of 
people whose days go by beside the winepress, and 
under the green and purple shadows, and whose ma- 
terial happiness depends on the crop of grapes. For 
them the thought of Dionysus and his circle, a little 
Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of 
life, and was a complete religion, a sacred representa- 
tion or interpretation of the whole human experience, 
modified by the special limitations, the special privi- 
leges of insight or suggestion, incident to their peculiar 
mode of existence. 

Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the 
scope of the religion of Dionysus was to the Greeks 
who lived in it, all it represented to them by way of 
one clearly conceived yet complex symbol, let him 
reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and ex- 
pression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the 
cup fell out of the whole body of existing poetry ; how 
many fascinating trains of reflexion, what colour and 
substance would therewith have been deducted from it, 
filled as it is, apart from the more aweful associations 
of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad's cup, with 
all the various symbolism of the fruit of the vine. 
That supposed loss is but an imperfect measure of all 
that the name of Dionysus recalled to the Greek mind, 
under a single imaginable form, an outward body of 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 3 

flesh presented to the senses, and comprehending, as 
its animating soul, a whole world of thoughts, surmises, 
greater and less experiences. 

' The student of the comparative science of religions 
finds in the religion of Dionysus one of many modes 
of that primitive tree-worship which, growing out of 
some universal instinctive belief that trees and flowers 
are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found almost 
everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation, en- 
shrined in legend or custom, often graceful enough, as 
if the dehcate beauty of the object of worship had 
eflectually taken hold on the fancy of the worshipper. 
Shelley's Sensitive Plant ^\iOws in what mists of poetical 
reverie such feeUng may still float about a mind full 
of modern lights; the feeling we too have of a life in the 
green world, always ready to assert its claim over our 
sympathetic fancies. Who has not at moments felt 
the scruple, which is with us always regarding animal 
life, following the signs of animation further still, till 
one almost hesitates to pluck out the little soul of 
flower or leaf? 

And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had their 
share ; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in 
the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intel- 
ligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of 
Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did 



4 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind 
in the trees may be, for certain prepared and chosen 
ears, intelHgible voices; they could beUeve in the 
transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint 
and hyacinth ; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid 
are but a fossilised form of one morsel here and there, 
from a whole world of transformation, with which their 
nimble fancy was perpetually playing. '^Together 
with them," says the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, of 
the Hamadryads, the nymphs which animate the 
forest trees, " with them, at the moment of their birth, 
grew up out of the soil, oak-tree or pine, fair, flourish- 
ing among the mountains. And when at last the ap- 
pointed hour of their death has come, first of all, those 
fair trees are dried up ; the bark perishes from around 
them, and the branches fall away ; and therewith the 
soul of them deserts the light of the sun." 

These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing it 
with interchange of sun and shade. They bathe, they 
dance, they sing songs of enchantment, so that those 
who' seem oddly in love with nature, and strange 
among their fellows, are still said to be nympholepti ; 
above all, they are weavers or spinsters, spinning or 
weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured 
threads, the fohage of the trees, the petals of flowers, 
the skins of the fruit, the long thin stalks on which 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 5 

the poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer com- 
pares to them, in their constant motion, the maids who 
sit spinning in the house of Alcinous. The nymphs 
of Naxos, where the grape-skin is darkest, weave for 
him a purple robe. Only, the ivy is never transformed, 
is visible as natural ivy to the last, pressing the dark 
outline of its leaves close upon the firm, white, quite 
human flesh of the god's forehead. 

In 'its earhest form, then, the religion of Dionysus 
presents us with the most graceful phase of this grace- 
ful worship, occupying a place between the ruder 
fancies of half-civiHsed people concerning hfe in flower 
or tree, and the dreamy after-fancies of the poet of 
the Sensitive Plant He is the soul of the individual 
vine, first ; the young vine at the house-door of the 
newly married, for instance, as the vine-grower stoops 
over it, coaxing and nursing it, like a pet animal or a 
little child ; afterwards, the soul of the whole species, 
the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a 
thousand vines, as the higher intelligence, brooding 
more deeply over things, pursues, in thought, the 
generation of sweetness and strength in the veins of 
the tree, the transformation of water into wine, little 
by Httle; noting all the influences upon it of the 
heaven above and the earth beneath ; and shadowing 
forth, in each pause of the process, an intervening 



6 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

person — what is to us but the secret chemistry of 
nature being to them the mediation of living spirits." 
So they passed on to think of Dionysus (naming him 
at last from the brightness of the sky and the moisture 
of the earth) not merely as the soul of the vine, but 
of all that life in flowing things of which the vine is 
the symbol, because its most emphatic example. At 
Delos he bears a son, from whom in turn spring the 
three mysterious sisters GEno, Spermo, and Elaisj who, 
dwelling in the island, exercise respectively the gifts 
of turning all things at will into oil, and corn, and 
wine. In the Bacchce of Euripides, he gives his 
followers, by miracle, honey and milk, and the water 
gushes for them from the smitten rock. He comes 
at last to have a scope equal to that of Demeter, a 
realm as wide and mysterious as hers ; the whole 
productive power of the earth is in him, and the 
explanation of its annual change. As some embody 
their intuitions of that power in com, so others in 
wine. He is the dispenser of the earth's hidden 
wealth, "giver of riches through the vine, as Demeter 
through the grain. And as Demeter sends the airy, 
dainty-wheeled and dainty-winged spirit of Triptole- 
mus to bear her gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus 
goes on his eastern journey, with its many intricate ad- 
ventures, on which he carries his gifts to every people. 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 7 

A little Olympus oictside the greater, I said, of 
Dionysus and his companions ; he is the centre of 
a cycle, the hierarchy of the creatures of water and 
sunHght in many degrees ; and that fantastic system 
of tree-worship places round him, not the fondly 
whispering spirits of the more graceful inhabitants or 
woodland only, the nymphs of the poplar and the 
pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening between 
the headship of the vine and the mere earth, the 
grosser, less human spirits, incorporate and made 
visible, of the more coarse and sluggish sorts of vege- 
table strength, the fig, the reed, the ineradicable weed- 
things which will attach themselves, climbing ■ about 
the vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the hot 
stones. For as Dionysus, the spiritual form of the 
vine, is of the highest human type, so the fig-tree 
and the reed have animal souls, mistakeable in the 
thoughts of a later, imperfectly remembering age, 
for mere abstractions of animal nature ; Snubnose, 
and Sweetwine, and Silenus, the oldest of them all, so 
old that he has come to have the gift of prophecy. 

Quite different from them in origin and intent, but 
confused with them in form, are those other com- 
panions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home- 
spun dream of simple people, and like them in the 
uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no 



8 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

story ; he is but a presence ; the spiritual form of 
Arcadia, and the ways of human Hfe there ; the re- 
flexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and 
orchards, and wild honey ; the dangers of its hunters ; 
its weariness in noonday heat ; its children, agile as 
the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque 
rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle 
him, in the unfamiliar upper places ; its one adorn- 
ment and solace being the dance to the homely shep- 
herd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the 
brook Molpeia. 

Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which is 
so profound in the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines, 
the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the 
strange echoings and dying of sound on the heights, 
"the bird, which among the petals of many- flowered 
spring, pouring out a dirge, sends forth her honey- 
voiced song," " the crocus and the hyacinth disorderly 
mixed in the deep grass " — things which the rehgion 
of Dionysus loves — Pan joins the company of the 
satyrs. Amongst them, they give their names to 
insolence and mockery, and the finer sorts of malice, 
to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But the best spirits 
have found in them also a certain human pathos, as 
in displaced beings, coming even nearer to most men, 
in their very roughness, than the noble and delicate 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 9 

person of the vine ; dubious creatures, half-way 
between the animal and human kinds, speculating 
wistfully on their being, because not wholly under- 
standing themselves and their place in nature ; as the 
animals seem always to have this expression to some 
noticeable degree in the presence of man. In the later 
school of Attic sculpture they are treated with more 
and more of refinement, till in some happy moment 
Praxiteles conceived a model, often repeated, which 
concentrates this sentiment of true humour concerning 
them ; a model of dainty natural ease in posture, but 
with the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly-bred gods 
are used to carry them, and with some puzzled trouble 
of youth, you might wish for a moment to smoothe 
away, puckering the forehead a little, between the 
pointed ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal 
strength grows low. Little by little, the signs of 
brute nature are subordinated, or disappear ; and at 
last, Robetta, a humble ItaUan engraver of the fifteenth 
century, entering into the Greek fancy because it 
belongs to all ages, has expressed it in its most exqui- 
site form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of 
whom their mother is no longer afraid, as in the 
Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck-noses have grown 
delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover, you 
may call them winsome, if you please ; and no one 



10 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

would wish those hairy Httle shanks away, with which 
one of the small Pans walks at her side, grasping her 
skirt stoutly ; while the other, the sick or weary one, 
rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful 
Italian dress, and decked airily with fruit and corn, 
steps across a country of cut sheaves, pressing it closely 
to her, with a child's peevish trouble in its face, and 
its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs folded over together, 
precisely after the manner of a little child. 

There is one element in the conception of Dionysus, 
which his connexion with the satyrs, Marsyas being 
one of them, and with Pan, from whom the flute 
passed to all the shepherds of Theocritus, alike illus- 
trates, his interest, namely, in one of the great species 
of music. One form of that wilder vegetation, of 
which the Satyr race is the soul made visible, is the 
reed, which the creature plucks and trims into musical 
pipes. And as Apollo inspires and rules over all the 
music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules over 
all the music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the 
ideas of water and of vegetable life are brought close 
together, natural property, therefore, of the spirit of 
Hfe in the green sap. I said that the religion of 
Dionysus was, for those who lived in it, a complete 
religion, a complete sacred representation and inter- 
pretation of the whole of life ; and as, in his relation 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 11 

to the vine, he fills for them the place of Demeter, is 
the life of the earth through the grape as she through 
the grain, so, in this other phase of his being, in his 
relation to the reed, he fills for them the place of 
Apollo j he is the inherent cause of music and poetry ; 
he inspires j he explains the phenomena of enthusi- 
asm, as distinguished by Plato in the Fhcedrus, the 
secrets of possession by a higher and more energetic 
spirit than one's own, the gift of self-revelation, of 
passing out of oneself through words, tones, gestures. 
A winged Dionysus, venerated at Amyclae, was per- 
haps meant to represent him thus, as the god of en- 
thusiasm, of the rising up on those spiritual wings, of 
which also we hear something in the Fhcedrus of Plato. 
The artists of the Renaissance occupied themselves 
much with the person and the story of Dionysus ; and 
Michelangelo, in a work still remaining in Florence, 
in which he essayed with success to produce a thing 
which should pass with the critics for a piece of 
ancient sculpture, has represented him in the fiilness, 
as it seems, of this enthusiasm, an image of delighted, 
entire surrender to transporting dreams. And this is 
no subtle after-thought of a later age, but true to 
certain finer movements of old Greek sentiment, 
though it may seem to have waited for the hand of 
Michelangelo before it attained complete realisation. 



12 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

The head of Ion leans, as they recline at the banquet, 
on the shoulder of Charmides ; he mutters in his sleep 
of things seen therein, but awakes as the flute-players 
enter, whom Charmides has hired for his birthday 
supper. The soul of Callias, who sits on the other 
side of Charmides, flashes out ; he counterfeits, with 
life-like gesture, the personal tricks of friend or foe ; 
or the things he could never utter before, he finds 
words for now; the secrets of life are on his lips. 
It is in this loosening of the lips and heart, strictly, 
that Dionysus is the Deliverer, Eleutherios ; and of 
such enthusiasm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain sense, an 
older patron than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi, 
the centre of Greek inspiration and of the religion 
of Apollo, his claim always maintained itself; and 
signs are not wanting that Apollo was but a later 
comer there. There, under his later reign, hard by 
the golden image of Apollo himself, near the sacred 
tripod on which the Pythia sat to prophesy, was to 
be seen a strange object — a sort of coffin or cinerary 
urn with the inscription, '' Here lieth the body of 
Dionysus, the son of Semele." The pediment of the 
great temple was divided between them — Apollo with 
the nine Muses on that side, Dionysus, with perhaps 
three times three Graces, on this. A third of the 
whole year w^as held sacred to him ; the four winter 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 13 

months were the months of Dionysus ; and in the 
shrine of Apollo itself he was worshipped with almost 
equal devotion. 

The religion of Dionysus takes us back, then, into 
that old Greek life of the vineyards,- as we see it on 
many painted vases, with much there as we should 
find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's mediae- 
val fresco of the Invention of Wme in the Campo 
Santo at Pisa — the family of Noah, presented among 
all the circumstances of a Tuscan vineyard, around 
the press from which the first wine is flowing, a 
painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent in 
decay, and not without^ its solemn touch of biblical 
symbolism. For differences, we detect in that primi- 
tive life, and under that Greek sky, a nimbler play of 
fancy, lightly and unsuspiciously investing all things 
with personal aspect and incident, and a certain mys- 
tical apprehension, now almost departed, of unseen 
powers beyond the material veil of things, correspond- 
ing to the exceptional vigour and variety of the Greek 
organisation. This peasant life lies, in unhistoric 
time, behind the definite forms with which poetry and 
a refined priesthood afterwards clothed the religion of 
Dionysus ; and the mere scenery and circumstances 
of the vineyard have determined many things in its 
development. The noise of the vineyard still sounds 



14 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

♦ 

in some of his epithets, perhaps in his best-known 
name — lacchus, Bacchus. The masks suspended on 
base or cornice, so famihar an ornament in later 
Greek architecture, are the little faces hanging from 
the vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds. 
That garland of ivy, the aesthetic value of which is 
so great in the later imagery of Dionysus and his 
descendants, the leaves of which floating from his 
hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and 
Tintoret, was actually worn on the head for coolness ; 
his earliest and most sacred images were wrought in 
the wood of the vine. The people of the vineyard 
had their feast, the Httk or country Dionysia, which 
still lived on, side by side with the greater ceremonies 
of a later time, celebrated in December, the time of 
the storing of the new wine. It was then that the 
potters* fair came, calpis and amphora, together with 
lamps against the winter, laid out in order for the 
choice of buyers ; for Keramus, the Greek Vase, is a 
son of Dionysus, of wine and of Athene, who teaches 
men all serviceable and decorative art. Then the 
goat was killed, and its blood poured out at the root 
of the vines ; and Dionysus literally drank the blood 
of goats ; and, being Greeks, with quick and mobile 
sympathies, SEto-tSat/xoves, '^ superstitious," or rather 
" susceptible of rehgious impressions," some among 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 15 

them, remembering those departed since last year, 
add yet a Httle more, and a little wine and water for 
the dead also ; brooding how the sense of these 
things might pass below the roots, to spirits hungry 
and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy homes. But 
the gaiety, that gaiety which Aristophanes in the 
Achaimians has depicted with so many vivid touches, 
as a thing of which civil war had deprived the villages 
of Attica, preponderates over the grave. The trav- 
elhng country show comes round with its puppets; 
even the slaves have their holiday^; the mirth be- 
comes excessive ; they hide their faces under gro- 
tesque masks of bark, or stain them with wine-lees, or 
potters' crimson even, like the old rude idols painted 
red ; and carry in midnight procession such rough 
symbols of the productive force of nature as the 
women and children had best not look upon ; which 
will be frowned upon, and refine themselves, or dis- 
appear, in the feasts of cultivated Athens. 

Of the whole story of Dionysus, it was the episode 
of his marriage with Ariadne about which ancient art 
concerned itself oftenest, and with most effect. Here, 
although the antiquarian may still detect circumstances 

1 There were some who suspected Dionysus of a secret demo- 
cratic interest ; though indeed he was liberator only of men's hearts, 
and eAev^epeu? Only because he never forgot Eleutherae, the little 
place which, in Attica, first received him. 



16 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

which link the persons and incidents of the legend 
with the mystical hfe of the earth, as symbols of its 
annual change, yet the merely human interest of the 
story has prevailed over its earlier significance ; the 
spiritual form of fire and dew has become a romantic 
lover. And as a story of romantic love, fullest per- 
haps of all the motives of classic legend of the pride 
of life, it survived with undiminished interest to a 
later world, two of the greatest masters of Italian 
painting having poured their whole power into it ; 
Titian with greater space of ingathered shore and 
mountain, and solemn foliage, and fiery animal life ; 
Tintoret with profounder luxury of delight in the 
nearness to each other, and imminent embrace, of 
glorious bodily presences ; and both alike with con- 
summate beauty of physical form. Hardly less 
humanised is the Theban legend of Dionysus, the 
legend of his birth from Semele, which, out of the 
entire body of tradition concerning him, was accepted 
as central by the Athenian imagination. For the 
people of Attica, he comes from Boeotia, a country 
of northern marsh and mist, but from whose sombre, 
black marble towns came also the vine, the musical 
reed cut from its sedges, and the worship of the 
Graces, always so closely connected with the rehgion 
of Dionysus. ^^At Thebes alone," says Sophocles, 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 17 

^^ mortal women bear immortal gods." His mother 
is the daughter of Cadmus, himself marked out by 
many curious circumstances as the close kinsman of 
the earth, to which he all but returns at last, as the 
serpent, in his old age, attesting some closer sense 
lingering there of the affinity of man with the dust 
from whence he came. Semele, an old Greek word, 
as it seems, for the surface of the earth, the daughter 
of Cadmus, beloved by Zeus, desires to see her lover 
in the glory with which he is seen by the immortal 
Hera. He appears to her in lightning. But the 
mortal may not behold him and live. Semele gives 
premature birth to the child Dionysus; whom, to 
preserve it from the jealousy of Hera, Zeus hides in 
a part of his thigh, the child returning into the loins 
of its father, whence in due time it is born again. 
Yet in. this fantastic story, hardly less than in the 
legend of Ariadne, the story of Dionysus has become 
a story of human persons, with human fortunes, and 
even more intimately human appeal to sympathy ; so 
that Euripides, pre-eminent as a poet of pathos, finds , 
in it a subject altogether to his mind. All the interest 
now turns on the development of its points of moral 
or sentimental significance ; the love of the immortal 
for the mortal, the presumption of the daughter of 
man who desires to see the divine form as it is ; 



18 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

on the fact that not without loss of sight, or life 
itself, can man look upon it. The travail of nature 
has been transformed into the pangs of the human 
mother; and the poet dwells much on the pathetic 
incident of death in childbirth, making Dionysus, as 
Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out 
among its enemies, motherless. And as a consequence 
of this human interest, the legend attaches itself, as 
in an actual history, to definite sacred objects and 
places, the venerable relic of the wooden image which 
fell into the chamber of Semele with the lightning- 
flash, and which the piety of a later age covered with 
plates of brass ; the Ivy-Fountain near Thebes, the 
water of which was so wonderfully bright and sweet 
to drink, where the nymphs bathed the new-born 
child; the grave of Semele, in a sacred enclosure 
grown with ancient vines, where some volcanic heat 
or flame was perhaps actually traceable, near the 
lightning- struck ruins of her supposed abode. 

Yet, though the mystical body of the earth is for- 
gotten in the human anguish of the mother of Dio- 
nysus, the sense of his essence of fire and dew still 
lingers in his most sacred name, as the son of Semele, 
Dithyrambus, We speak of a certain wild music in 
words or rhythm as dithyrambic, like the ""dithyram- 
bus, that is, the wild choral-singing of the worshippers 



' A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 19 

of Dionysus. But Dithyrambus seems to have been, 
in the first instance, the name, not of the hymn, but 
of the god to whom the hymn is sung ; and, through 
a tangle of curious etymological speculations as to the 
precise derivation of this name, one thing seems clearly 
visible, that it commemorates, namely, the double 
birth of the vine-god ; that he is born once and 
again ; his birth, first of fire, and afterwards of dew ; 
the two dangers that beset him ; his victory over two 
enemies, the capricious, excessive heats and colds of 
spring. 

He is TTvpLyev^s, then, fire-born, the son of light- 
ning ; lightning being to light, as regards concentra- 
tion, what wine is to the other strengths of the earth. 
And who that has rested a hand on the glittering silex 
of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes 
of sweetness are lying, does not feel this? It is 
out of the bitter salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that 
it comes up with the most curious virtues. The 
mother faints and is parched up by the heat which 
brings the child to the birth ; and it pierces through, 
a wonder of freshness, drawing its everlasting green 
and typical coolness out of the midst of the ashes ; 
its own stem becoming at last like a tangled mass of 
tortured metal. In thinking of Dionysus, then, as 
fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sen- 



20 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

timent, the poetry, of all tender things which grow 
out of a hard soil, or in any sense blossom before the 
leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of Enghsh gardens, 
with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the 
leafless twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of 
Tuscany, or Aaron's rod that budded, or the staff in 
the hand of the Pope when Tannhauser's repentance 
is accepted. 

And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of 
which he was born would destroy him in his turn, as 
it withered up his mother ; a second danger comes ; 
from this the plant is protected by the influence of 
the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father the sky, 
in which it is wrapped and hidden, and of which it is 
born again, its second mother being, in some versions 
of the legend, Hye— the Dew. The nursery, where 
Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in Mount 
Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many 
lands, but really, Hke the place of the carrying away 
of Persephone, a place of fantasy, the oozy place of 
springs in the hollow of the hillside, nowhere and every- 
where, where the vine was ''invented." The nymphs 
of the trees overshadow it from above ; the nymphs of 
the springs sustain it from below — the Hyades, those 
first leaping maenads, who, as the springs become rain- 
clouds, go up to heaven among the stars, and descend 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 21 

again, as dew or shower, upon it ; so that the rehgion 
of Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only, 
but also with ancient water- worship, the worship of the 
spiritual forms of springs and streams. To escape from 
his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea, the original 
of all rain and springs, whence, in early summer, the 
women of Elis and Argos were wont to call him, with 
the singing of a hymn. And again, in thus commem- 
orating Dionysus as born of the dew, the Greeks appre- 
hend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of water. 
For not the heat only, but its solace — \h^ freshness of 
the cup — this too was felt by those people of the vine- 
yard, whom the prophet Melampus had taught to mix 
always their wine with w^ater, and with whom the water- 
ing of the vines became a religious ceremony ; the very 
dead, as they thought, drinking of and refreshed by the 
stream. x\nd who that has ever felt the heat of a south- 
ern country does not know this poetry, the motive of 
the lovehest of all the works attributed to Giorgione, 
the Fete Champetre in the Louvre ; the intense sensa- 
tions, the subtle and far-reaching symbolisms, which, 
in these places, cling about the touch and sound and 
sight of it? Think of the darkness of the well in 
the breathless court, with the delicate ring of ferns 
kept alive just within the opening ; of the sound of 
the fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into 



22 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

the houses of Venice, on summer mornings ; of the 
cry Acqiia fresca I at Padua or Verona, when the 
people run to buy what they prize, in its rare purity, 
more than wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite 
appeal to the imagination, that, in these streets, the 
very beggars, one thinks, might exhaust all the phi- 
losophy of the epicurean. 

Out of all these fancies comes the vine-growers' god, 
the spiritual form of fire and dew. Beyond the famous 
representations of Dionysus in later art and poetry — 
the Bacchanals of Euripides, the statuary of the school 
of Praxiteles — a multitude of literary allusions and 
local customs carry us back to this world of vision 
unchecked by positive knowledge, in which the myth 
is begotten among a primitive people, as they won- 
dered over the life of the thing their hands helped 
forward, till it became for them a kind of spirit, and 
their culture of it a kind of worship. Dionysus, as we 
see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression 
of the ways and dreams of this primitive people, 
brooded over and harmonised by the energetic Greek 
imagination ; the religious imagination of the Greeks 
being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bring- 
ing together things naturally asunder, making, as it 
were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the 
human soul a body of flowers ; welding into something 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 23 

like the identity of a human personaHty the whole 
range of man's experiences of a given object, or series 
of objects — all their outward qualities, and the visible 
facts regarding them — all the hidden ordinances by 
which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, 
and have their roots in purely visionary places. 

Dionysus came later than the other gods to the 
centres of Greek Hfe ; and, as a consequence of this, 
he is presented to us in an earher stage of develop- 
ment than they ; that element of natural fact which 
is the original essence of all mythology being more 
unmistakeably impressed upon us here than in other 
myths. Not the least interesting point in the study 
of him is, that he illustrates very clearly, not only 
the earlier, but also a certain later influence of this 
element of natural fact, in the development of the 
gods of Greece. For the physical sense, latent in it, 
is the clue, not merely to the original signification 
of the incidents of the divine story, but also to the 
source of the peculiar imaginative expression which 
its persons subsequently retain, in the forms of the 
higher Greek sculpture. And this leads me to some 
general thoughts on the relation of Greek sculpture 
to mythology, which may help to explain what the 
function of the imagination in Greek sculpture really 
was, in its handling of divine persons. 



24 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive inten- 
tion, the open sky, across which the thunder some- 
times sounds, and from which the rain descends — 
is a fact which not only explains the various stories 
related concerning him, but determines also the ex- 
poression which he retained in the work of Pheidias, so 
far as it is possible to recall it, long after the growth 
of those later stories had obscured, for the minds of 
his worshippers, his primary signification. If men felt, 
as Arrian tells us, that it was a calamity to die without 
having seen the Zeus of Olympia ; that was because 
they experienced the impress there of that which the 
eye and the whole being of man love to find above 
him ; and the genius of Pheidias had availed to shed, 
upon the gold and ivory of the physical form, the 
blandness, the breadth, the smile of the open sky ; the 
mild heat of it still coming and going, in the face of 
the father of all the children of sunshine and shower ; 
as if one of the great white clouds had composed 
itself into it, and looked down upon them thus, out 
of the midsummer noonday ; so that those things 
might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the 
young and the old, the weak and the strong, who 
came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as 
procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and 
tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple ; while 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 25 

all the time those people consciously apprehended in 
the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, and 
really human, characteristics. 

Or think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona. The 
oracle of Dodona, with its dim grove of oaks, and 
sounding instruments of brass to husband the faintest 
whisper in the leaves, w^as but a great consecration of 
that sense of a mysterious wdll, of which people still 
feel, or seem to feel, the expression, in the motions 
of the wind, as it comes and goes, and which makes 
it, indeed, seem almost more than a mere symbol 
of the spirit wathin us. For Zeus was, indeed, the 
god of the winds also ; ^olus, their so-called god, 
being only his mortal minister, as having come, by 
long study of them, through signs in the fire and 
the like, to have a certain communicable skill regard- 
ing them, in relation to practical uses. Now, suppose 
a Greek sculptor to have proposed to himself to pre- 
sent to his worshippers the image of this Zeus of 
Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents of 
the air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative 
sculptor, working as Pheidias worked, the very soul of 
those moving, sonorous creatures would have passed 
through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the image ; 
as they can actually pass into the visible expression 
of those who have drunk deeply of them ; as we may 



26 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

notice, sometimes, in our walks on momitain or 
shore. 

Victory again — Nike — associated so often with 
Zeus — on the top of his staff, on the foot of his 
throne, on the pahn of his extended hand — meant 
originally, mythologic science tells us, only the great 
victory of the sky, the triumph of morning over dark- 
ness. But that physical morning of her origin has its 
ministry to the later aesthetic sense also. For if 
Nike, when she appears in company with the mortal, 
and wholly fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to 
guide the horses, or whom she crowns with her gar- 
land of parsley or bay, or whose names she writes on 
a shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the 
old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed in 
her clear-set eyes, and the dew of the morning still 
clings to her wings and her floating hair. 

The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculp- 
ture, in its handhng of divine persons, is thus to 
condense the impressions of natural things into human 
form ; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or 
wind, or light, in the moulding of eye and brow ; 
to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as 
human expression. The body of man, indeed, was 
for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus ; 
its connexion with earth and air asserted in many 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 27 

a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through in- 
numerable stages of descent, but direct and immedi- 
ate ; in precise contrast to our physical theory of 
our life, which never seems to fade, dream over it as 
we will, out of the light of common day. The oracles 
with their messages to human intelligence from birds 
and springs of water, or vapours of the earth, were 
a witness to that connexion. Their story went back, 
as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in 
the very places where their later life was lived, to a 
past, stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual 
memory, in which heaven and earth mingled ; to 
those who were sons and daughters of stars, and 
streams, and dew ; to an ancestry of grander men and 
women, actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the 
qualities and influences of those objects ; and w^e can 
hardly over-estimate the influence on the Greek imag- 
ination of this mythical connexion with the natural 
world, at not so remote a date, and of the solem- 
nising power exercised thereby over their thoughts. 
In this intensely poetical situation, the historical 
Greeks, the Athenians of the age of Pericles, found 
themselves ; it was as if the actual roads on which 
men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible 
wonderland. 

With such habitual impressions concerning the 



28 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

body, the physical nature of man, the Greek sculptor, 
in his later day, still free in imagination, through the 
lingering influence of those early dreams, may have 
more easily infused into human form the sense of sun, 
or lightning, or cloud, to which it was so closely akin, 
the spiritual flesh allying itself happily to mystical 
meanings, and readily expressing seemingly unspeak- 
able qualities. But the human form is a limiting 
influence also ; and in proportion as art impressed 
human form, in sculpture or in the drama, on the 
vaguer conceptions of the Greek mind, there was 
danger of an escape from them of the free spirit of 
air, and light, and sky. Hence, all through the 
history of Greek art, there is a struggle, a Streben, 
as the Germans say, between the palpable and limited 
human form, and the floating essence it is to contain. 
On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world, 
of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat 
formless theogony of Hesiod ; a world, the Titanic 
vastness of which is congruous with a certain sub- 
limity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, 
of motion or space ; as the Greek language itself has 
a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, 
fire, water, cold, sound — attesting a deep suscepti- 
bility to the impressions of those things — yet with 
edges, most often, melting into each other. On the 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 29 

other hand, there was that Hmiting, controlHng ten- 
dency, identified with the Dorian influence in the 
history of the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and 
wholly self-conscious intelligence ; bent on impressing 
everywhere, in the products of the imagination, the 
definite, perfectly conceivable human form, as the 
only worthy subject of art ; less in sympathy with 
the mystical genealogies of Hesiod, than with the 
heroes of Homer, ending in the entirely humanised 
religion of Apollo, the clearly understood humanity 
of the old Greek warriors in the marbles of ^gina. 
The representation of man, as he is or might be, 
became the aim of sculpture, and the achievement of 
this the subject of its whole history ; one early carver 
had opened the eyes, another the lips, a third had 
given motion to the feet ; in various ways, in spite of 
the retention of archaic idols, the genuine human ex- 
pression had come, with the truthfulness of life itself. 
These two tendencies, then, met and struggled and 
were harmonised in the supreme imagination, of 
Pheidias, in sculpture — of ^schylus, in the drama. 
Hence, a series of wondrous personalities, of which 
the Greek imagination became the dwelHng-place ; 
beautiful, perfectly understood human outlines, em- 
bodying a strange, delightful, lingering sense of 
clouds and water and sun. Such a world, the world 



30 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

of really imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see, 
reflected in many a humble vase or battered coin, in 
Bacchante^ and Centaur, and Amazon; evolved out 
of that "vasty deep"; with most command, in the 
consummate fragments of the Parthenon ; not, indeed, 
so that he who runs may read, the gifts of Greek 
sculpture being always delicate, and asking much of 
the receiver; but yet visible, and a pledge to us, of 
creative power, as, to the worshipper, of the presence, 
which, without that material pledge, had but vaguely 
haunted the fields and groves. 

This, then, was what the Greek imagination did 
for men's sense and experience of natural forces, in 
Athene, in Zeus, in Poseidon ; for men's sense and 
experience of their own bodily qualities — swiftness, 
energy, power of concentrating sight and hand and 
foot on a momentary physical act — in the close hair, 
the chastened muscle, the perfectly poised attention of 
the qtcoit-player ; for men's sense, again, of ethical 
qualities — restless idealism, inward vision, power of 
presence through that vision in scenes behind the ex- 
perience of ordinary men — in the idealised Alex- 
ander. 

To illustrate this function of the imagination, as 
especially developed in Greek art, we may reflect on 
what happens with us in the use of certain names, as 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 31 

expressing summarily, this name for you and that for 
me — Helen, Gretchen, Mary — a hundred associ- 
ations, trains of sound, forms, impressions, remem- 
bered in all sorts of degrees, which, through a very 
wide and full experience, they have the power of 
bringing with them ; in which respect, such names are 
but reveaUng instances of the whole significance, power, 
and use of language in general. Well, — the mythical 
conception, projected at last, in drama or sculpture, 
is the name, the instrument of the identification, of 
the given matter, — of its unity in variety, its outline 
or definition in mystery ; its spiritual fo7in, to use 
again the expression I have borrowed from WilHam 
Blake — form, with hands, and lips, and opened eye- 
lids — spiritual, as conveying to us, in that, the soul of 
rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity. 

To illustrate this, think what the effect would be, 
if you could associate, by some trick of memory, 
a certain group of natural objects, in all their varied 
perspective, their changes of colour and tone in 
varying light and shade, with the being and image 
of an actual person. You travelled through a country 
of clear rivers and wide meadows, or of high windy 
places, or of lowly grass and willows, or of the Lady 
of the Lake; and all the complex impressions of 
these objects wound themselves, as a second animated 



32 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

body, new and more subtle, around the person of 
some one left there, so that they no longer come 
to recollection apart from each other. Now try to 
conceive the image of an actual person, in whom, 
somehow, all those impressions of the vine and its 
fruit, as the highest type of the life of the green 
sap, had become incorporate; — all the scents and 
colours of its flower and fruit, and something of 
its curling foliage ; the chances of its growth ; the 
enthusiasm, the easy flow of more choice expression, 
as its juices mount within one ; for the image is 
eloquent, too, in word, gesture, and glancing of the 
eyes, which seem to be informed by some soul of 
the vine within it : as Wordsworth says, 

*' Beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face" — 

SO conceive an image into which the beauty, " born " 
of the vine, has passed ; and you have the idea of 
Dionysus, as he appears, entirely fashioned at last 
by central Greek poetry and art, and is consecrated in 
the OtVo^opta and the 'AvOeo-rypia, the great festivals 
of the Winepress and the Flowers, 

The word wine, and with it the germ of the myth 
of Dionysus, is older than the separation of the Indo- 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 33 

Germanic race. Yet, with the people of Athens, 
Dionysus counted as the youngest of the gods ; he 
was also the son of a mortal, dead in childbirth, and 
seems always to have exercised the charm of the latest 
born, in a sort of allowable fondness. Through the 
fine-spun speculations of modern ethnologists and 
grammarians, noting the changes in the letters of his 
name, and catching at the slightest historical records 
of his worship, we may trace his coming from Phrygia, 
the birthplace of the more mystical elements of Greek 
religion, over the mountains of Thrace. On the 
heights of Pangaeus he leaves an oracle, with a per- 
petually burning fire, famous down to the time of 
Augustus, who reverently visited it. Southwards still, 
over the hills of Parnassus, which remained for the 
inspired women of Boeotia the centre of his presence, 
he comes to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus. 
From Boeotia he passes to Attica; to the villages 
first ; at last to Athens ; at an assignable date, under 
Peisistratus ; out of the country, into the town. 

To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of 
'^ enthusiasm " already belonged ; it was to the Athe- 
nians of the town, to urbane young men, sitting 
together at the banquet, that those expressions of a 
sudden eloquence came, of the loosened utterance 
and finer speech, its colour and imagery. Dionysus, 



34 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

then, has entered Athens, to become urbane like 
them ; to walk along the marble streets in frequent 
procession, in the persons of noble youths, like those 
who at the Oschophoria bore the branches of the vine 
from his temple, to the temple of Athene of the 
Parasol^ or of beautiful slaves ; to contribute through 
the arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps also in 
part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradu- 
ally, his rough country feasts will be outdone by the 
feasts of the town ; and as comedy arose out of those, 
so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance 
upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the 
town, is from the first tinged with melancholy, as if in 
entering the town he had put off his country peace. 
The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, 
like a strenuous mortal hero, Hke Hercules or Perseus, 
has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and 
hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Diony- 
sus, then, — of Dionysus in winter — that all Greek 
tragedy grows ; out of the song of the sorrows of 
Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of 
satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his 
rural life, one and another of whom, from time to 
time, steps out of the company to emphasise and 
develope this or that circumstance of the story ; and 
so the song becomes dramatic. He will soon forget 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 35 

that early country life, or remember it but as the 
dreamy background of his later existence" He will 
become, as always in later art and poetry, of dazzling 
whiteness ; no longer dark with the air and sun, but 
like one €cr/c6aTpo(^?yK(os — brought up under the shade 
of Eastern porticoes or pavilions, or in the light that 
has only reached him softened through the texture of 
green leaves ; honey-pale, like the delicate people of 
the city, like the flesh of women, as those old vase- 
painters conceive of it, who leave their hands and 
faces untouched with the pencil on the white clay. 
The ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-lees, 
or coarser colour, will hardly recognise his double, in 
the white, graceful, mournful figure, weeping, chastened, 
lifting up his arms in yearning affection towards his 
late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etrus- 
can mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of 
these town-feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus 
into Athens, you must suppose, not the later Athens 
which is oftenest in our thoughts, the Athens of Peri- 
cles and Pheidias ; but that Httle earlier Athens of 
Peisistratus, which the Persians destroyed, which some 
of us perhaps would rather have seen, in its early 
simplicity, than the greater one ; when the old image 
of the god, carved probably out of the stock of an 
enormous vine, had just come from the village of 



36 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

Eleutherae to his first temple in the LencEiim — the 
quarter of the winepresses, near the LunncB — the 
marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of 
Nysa : its little buildings on the hill-top, still with 
steep rocky ways, crowding round the ancient temple 
of Erectheus and the grave of Cecrops, with the old 
miraculous olive-tree still growing there, and the old 
snake of Athene Polias still alive somewhere in the 
temple court. 

The artists of the Italian Renaissance have treated 
Dionysus many times, and with great effect, but always 
in his joy, as an embodiment of that glory of nature 
to which the Renaissance was a return. But in an 
early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Diony- 
sus treated differently. The cold hght of the back- 
ground displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers 
of an Italian town, and quiet water. In the fore- 
ground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in 
a posture of statuesque weariness ; the leaves of the 
vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing heavily round 
the head of the god, suggest the notion of his incor- 
poration into it. The right hand, holding a great 
vessel languidly and indifferently, lets the stream of 
wine flow along the earth ; while the left supports the 
forehead, shadowing heavily a face, comely, but full 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 37 

of an expression of painful brooding. One knows 
not how far one may really be from the mind of the 
old Italian engraver, in gathering from his design this 
impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus. 
But modern motives are clearer ; and in a Bacchus 
by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the 
Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and 
very fascinating reahsation of such a motive ; the god 
of the bitterness of wine, '^ of things too sweet " ; the 
sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat 
brackish in the cup. Touched by the sentiment of 
this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether 
anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in 
the range of Greek ideas; — had some antitype of 
this fascinating figure any place in Greek religion? 
Yes j in a certain darker side of the double god of 
nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of 
Thebes and Naxos, but never quite forgotten, some- 
thing corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea, 
really existed — the conception of Dionysus Zagreus ; 
an image, which has left, indeed, but little eifect in 
Greek art and poetry, which criticism has to put 
patiently together, out of late, scattered hints in 
various writers ; but which is yet discernible, clearly 
enough to show that it really visited certain Greek 
minds here and there ; and discernible, not as a late 



38 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

after-thought, but as a tradition really primitive, and 
harmonious with the original motive of the idea of 
Dionysus. In its potential, though unrealised scope, 
it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek religious 
poetry, and is, at least, part of the complete physiog- 
nomy of Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to the 
modern student, after a complete survey. 

The whole compass of the idea of Dionysus, a dual 
god of both summer and winter, became ultimately, 
as we saw, almost identical with that of Demeter. 
The Phrygians believed that the god slept in winter 
and awoke in summer, and celebrated his waking and 
sleeping; or that he was bound and imprisoned in 
winter, and unbound in spring. We saw how, in EHs 
and at Argos, the women called him out of the sea, 
with the singing of hymns, in early spring ; and a 
beautiful ceremony in the temple at Delphi, which, 
as we know, he shares with Apollo, described by Plu- 
tarch, represents his mystical resurrection. Yearly, 
about the time of the shortest day, just as the light 
begins to increase, and while hope is still tremulously 
strung, the priestesses of Dionysus were wont to 
assemble with many lights at his shrine, and there, 
with songs and dances, awoke the new-born child 
after his wintry sleep, waving in a sacred cradle, like 
the great basket used for winnowing corn, a symbol- 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 39 

ical image, or perhaps a real infant. He is twofold 
then — d. Doppelganger ; like Persephone, he belongs 
to two worlds, and has much in common with her, 
and a full share of those dark possibiHties which, 
even apart from the story of the rape, belong to her. 
He is a Chthoiiian god, and, like all the children of 
the earth, has an element of sadness ; like Hades 
himself, he is hollow and devouring, an eater of 
man's flesh — sarcophagies — the grave which con- 
sumed unaware the ivory-white shoulder of Pelops. 

And you have no sooner caught a glimpse of this 
image, than a certain perceptible shadow comes creep- 
ing over the whole story ; for, in effect, we have seen 
glimpses of the sorrowing Dionysus, all along. Part 
of the interest of the Theban legend of his birth is 
that he comes of the marriage of a god with a mortal 
woman ; and from the first, like mortal heroes, he 
falls within the sphere of human chances. At first, 
indeed, the melancholy settles round the person of 
his mother, dead in childbirth, and ignorant of the 
glory of her son ; in shame, according to Euripides ; 
punished, as her own sisters allege, for impiety. The 
death of Semele is a sort of ideal or type of this 
peculiar claim on human pity, as the descent of 
Persephone into Hades, of all human pity over the 
early death of women. Accordingly, his triumph 



40 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

being now consummated, he descends into Hades, 
through the unfathomable Alcyonian lake, according 
to the most central version of the legend, to bring 
her up from thence ; and that Hermes, the shadowy 
conductor of souls, is constantly associated with Dio- 
nysus, in the story of his early life, is not without 
significance in this connexion. As in Delphi the 
winter months were sacred to him, so in Athens his 
feasts all fall within the four months on this and the 
other side of the shortest day ; as Persephone spends 
those four months — a third part of the year — in 
Hades. Son or brother of Persephone he actually 
becomes at last, in confused, half-developed tradition ; 
and even has his place, with his dark sister, in the 
Eleusinian mysteries, as lacchus ; where, on the sixth 
day of the feast, in the great procession from Athens 
to Eleusis, we may still realise his image, moving up 
and down above the heads of the vast multitude, as 
he goes, beside '^ the tiifo,'' to the temple of Demeter, 
amid the light of torches at noonday. 

But it was among the mountains of Thrace that this 
gloomier element in the being of Dionysus had taken 
the strongest hold. As in sunny villages of Attica the 
cheerful elements of his religion had been developed, 
so, in those wilder northern regions, people continued 
to brood over its darker side, and hence a current of 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 41 

gloomy legend descended into Greece. The subject 
of the Bacchanals of Euripides is the infatuated 
opposition of Pentheus, king of Thebes, to Dionysus 
and his religion ; his cruelty to the god, whom he 
shuts up in prison, and who appears on the stage 
with his dehcate limbs cruelly bound, but who is 
finally triumphant ; Pentheus, the man of grief, being 
torn to pieces by his own mother, in the judicial mad- 
ness sent upon her by the god. In this play, Eurip- 
ides has only taken one of many versions of the same 
story, in all of which Dionysus is victorious, his enemy 
being torn to pieces by the sacred women, or by wild 
horses, or dogs, or the fangs of cold ; or the maenad 
Ambrosia, whom he is supposed to pursue for pur- 
poses of lust, suddenly becomes a vine, and binds him 
down to the earth inextricably, in her serpentine coils. 
In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes his 
enemies by repaying them in kind. But a deeper 
vein of poetry pauses at the sorrow, and in the con- 
flict does not too soon anticipate the final triumph. 
It is Dionysus himself who exhausts these sufferings. 
Hence, in many forms — reflexes of all the various 
phases of his wintry existence — the image of Dio- 
nysus Zagreus, the Hunter — of Dionysus in winter — 
storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills, from which, 
like Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into 



42 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

Greece ; the thought of the hunter concentrating into 
itself all men's forebodings over the departure of the 
year at its richest, and the death of all sweet things in 
the long-continued cold, when the sick and the old and 
little children, gazing out morning after morning on 
the dun sky, can hardly believe in the return any more 
of a bright day. Or he is connected with the fears, 
the dangers and hardships of the hunter himself, lost 
or slain sometimes, far from home, in the dense 
woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so 
ardently ; becoming, in his chase, almost akin to the 
wild beasts — to the wolf, who comes before us in the 
name of Lycurgus, one of his bitterest enemies — 
and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in the 
true intention of the myth. This transformation, this 
image of the beautiful soft creature become an enemy 
of human kind, putting off himself in his madness, 
wronged by his own fierce hunger and thirst, and 
haunting, with terrible sounds, the high Thracian 
farms, is the most tragic note of the whole picture, 
and links him on to one of the gloomiest creations of 
later romance, the were-wolf, the belief in which still 
lingers in Greece, as in France, where it seems to 
become incorporate in the darkest of all romantic 
histories, that of Gilles de Retz. 

And now we see whv the tradition of human 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 43 

sacrifice lingered on in Greece, in connexion with 
Dionysus, as a thing of actual detail, and not remote, 
so that Dionysius of Halicarnassus counts it among 
the horrors of Greek religion. That the sacred women 
of Dionysus ate, in mystical ceremony, raw flesh, and 
drank blood, is a fact often mentioned, and com- 
memorates, as it seems, the actual sacrifice of a fair 
boy deliberately torn to pieces, fading at last into 
a symbolical offering. At Delphi, the wolf was pre- 
served for him, on the principle by which Venus 
loves the dove, and Hera peacocks ; and there were 
places in which, after the sacrifice of a kid to him, 
a curious mimic pursuit of the priest who had offered 
it represented the still surviving horror of one who 
had thrown a child to the wolves. The three 
daughters of Minyas devote themselves to his wor- 
ship ; they cast lots, and one of them offers her 
own tender infant to be torn by the three, like a 
roe ; then the other women pursue them, and they 
are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures 
of the night. And fable is endorsed by history; 
Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of Salamis, 
with the assent of Themistocles, three Persian captive 
youths were offered to Dionysus the Devotirer, 

As, then, some embodied their fears of winter in 
Persephone, others embodied them in Dionysus, a 



44 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

devouring god, whose sinister side (as the best wine 
itself has its treacheries) is illustrated in the dark and 
shameful secret society described by Livy, in which 
his worship ended at Rome, afterwards abolished 
by solemn act of the senate. He becomes a new 
Aidoneus, a hunter of men's souls ; like him, to be 
appeased only by costly sacrifices. 

And then, Dionysus recovering from his mid- 
winter madness, how intensely these people conceive 
the spring ! It is that triumphant Dionysus, cured of 
his great malady, and sane in the clear light of 
the longer days, whom Euripides in the Bacchanals 
sets before us, as still, essentially, the Hunter, 
Zagreus ; though he keeps the red streams and torn 
flesh away from the delicate body of the god, in his 
long vesture of white and gold, and fragrant with 
Eastern odours. Of this I hope to speak in another 
paper; let me conclude this by one phase more of 
religious custom. 

If Dionysus, like Persephone, has his gloomy side, 
like her he has also a peculiar message for a cer- 
tain number of refined minds, seeking, in the later 
days of Greek religion, such modifications of the old 
legend as may minister to ethical culture, to the 
perfecting of the moral nature. . A type of second 
birth, from first to last, he opens, in his series of 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 45 

annual changes, for minds on the look-out for it, the 
hope of a possible analogy, between the resurrection 
of nature, and something else, as yet unreahsed, re- 
served for human souls ; and the beautiful, weeping 
creature, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, 
and rejuvenescent again at last, Hke a tender shoot 
of living green out of the hardness and stony dark- 
ness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal of 
chastening and purification, and of final victory 
through suffering. It is the finer, mystical senti- 
ment of the few, detached from the coarser and more 
material religion of the many, and accompanying it, 
through the course of its history, as its ethereal, less 
palpable, Hfe-giving soul, and, as always happens, 
seeking the quiet, and not too anxious to make itself 
felt by others. With some unfixed, though real, place 
in the general scheme of Greek religion, this phase 
of the worship of Dionysus had its special develop- 
ment in the Orphic literature and mysteries. Obscure 
as are those followers of the mystical Orpheus, we 
yet certainly see them, moving, and playing their 
part, in the later ages of Greek religion. Old friends 
with new faces, though they had, as Plato witnesses, 
their less worthy aspect, in certain appeals to vulgar, 
superstitious fears, they seem to have been not without 
the charm of a real and inward religious beauty, with 



46 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

their neologies, their new readings of old legends, 
their sense of mystical second meanings, as they re- 
fined upon themes grown too familiar, and linked, in 
a sophisticated age, the new to the old. In this 
respect, we may perhaps liken them to the mendi- 
cant orders in the Middle Ages, with their florid, 
romantic theology, beyond the bounds of orthodox 
tradition, giving so much new matter to art and 
poetry. They are a picturesque addition, also, to the 
exterior of Greek Hfe, with their white dresses, their 
dirges, their fastings and ecstasies, their outward as- 
ceticism and material purifications. And the central 
object of their worship comes before us as a tortured, 
persecuted, slain god — the suffering Dionysus — of 
whose legend they have their own special and eso- 
teric version. That version, embodied in a supposed 
Orphic poem. The Occultation of Dionysus, is repre- 
sented only by the details that have passed from it 
into the almost endless Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a 
writer of the fourth century ; and the imagery has to 
be put back into the shrine, bit by bit, and finally 
incomplete. Its central point is the picture of the 
rending to pieces of a divine child, of whom a tradi- 
tion, scanty indeed, but harmonious in its variations, 
had long maintained itself. It was in memory of it, 
that those who were initiated into the Orphic mys- 



A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 47 

teries tasted of the raw flesh of the sacrifice, and 
thereafter ate flesh no more ; and it connected itself 
with that strange object in the Delphic shrine, the 
grave of Dionysus. 

Son, first, of Zeus, and of Persephone whom Zeus 
woos, in the form of a serpent — the white, golden- 
haired child, the best-beloved of his father, and des- 
tined by him to be the ruler of the world, grows up 
in secret. But one day, Zeus, departing on a journey, 
in his great fondness for the child, delivered to him 
his crown and staff, and so left him — shut in a strong 
tower. Then it came to pass that the jealous Here 
sent out the Titans against him. They approached 
the crowned child, and with many sorts of playthings 
enticed him away, to have him in their power, and 
then miserably slew him — hacking his body to 
pieces, as the wind tears the vine, with the axe 
Pelektis^ which, like the swords of Roland and Arthur, 
has its proper name. The fragments of the body they 
boiled in a great cauldron, and made an impious 
banquet upon them, afterwards carrying the bones to 
Apollo, whose rival the young child should have been, 
thinking to do him service. But Apollo, in great pity 
for this his youngest brother, laid the bones in a 
grave, within his own holy place. Meanwhile, Here, 
full of her vengeance, brings to Zeus the heart of the 



48 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 

child, which she had snatched, still beating, from the 
hands of the Titans. But Zeus delivered the heart to 
Semele ; and the soul of the child remaining awhile 
in Hades, where Demeter made for it new flesh, was 
thereafter born of Semele — a second Zagreus — the 
younger, or Theban Dionysus. 



THE BACCHANALS OF 
EURIPIDES 



So far, I have endeavoured to present, with some- 
thing of the concrete character of a picture, Dionysus, 
the old Greek god, as we may discern him through a 
multitude of stray hints in art and poetry and religious 
custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies 
of early thought, through traits and touches in our 
own actual states of mind, which may seem sympa- 
thetic with those tendencies. In such a picture there 
must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things 
near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty, 
fact and surmise, being reflected and concentrated, 
for its production, as if on the surface of a mirror. 
Such concrete character, however, Greek poet or 
sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the vague 
world of popular belief and usage around him; and 
in the Bacchanals of Euripides we have an example 
of the figurative or imaginative power of poetry, 
selecting and combining, at will, from that mixed 
E 49 



50 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

and floating mass, weaving the many-coloured threads 
together, blending the various phases of legend — all 
the light and shade of the subject — into a shape, 
substantial and firmly set, through which a mere 
fluctuating tradition might retain a permanent place 
in men's imaginations. Here, in what Euripides 
really says, in what we actually see on the stage, as 
we read his play, we are dealing with a single real 
object, not with uncertain effects of many half- 
fancied objects. Let me leave you for a time 
almost wholly in his hands, while you look very 
closely at his work, so as to discriminate its out- 
lines clearly. 

/ This tragedy of the Bacchanals — a sort of masque 
or morality, as we say — a monument as central for 
the legend of Dionysus as the Homeric hymn for 
that of Demeter, is unique in Greek literature, and 
has also a singular interest in the life of Euripides 
himself. He is writing in old age (the piece was 
not played till after his death), not at Athens, nor for 
a polished Attic audience, but for a wilder and less 
temperately cultivated sort of people, at the court of 
Archelaus, in Macedonia. Writing in old age, he 
is in that subdued mood, a mood not necessarily 
sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach 
of the unknown world coming over him more fre- 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 51 

quently than of old) accustomed ideas, conformable 
to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen, 
oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a 
man's allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins 
to think, to differ from the received opinions thereon. 
Not that he is insincere or ironical, but that he tends, 
in the sum of probabilities, to dwell on their more 
peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining 
time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted 
side of things; and what is accustomed — what holds 
of familiar usage — comes to seem the whole essence 
of wisdom, on all subjects; and the well-known 
delineation of the vague country, in Homer or 
Hesiod, one's best attainable mental outfit, for the 
journey thither. With this sort of quiet wisdom the 
whole play is penetrated. Euripides has said, or 
seemed to say, many things concerning Greek relig- 
ion, at variance with received opinion; and now, 
in the end of life, he desires to make his peace — 
what shall at any rate be peace with men. He is in 
the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode; 
and this takes the direction, partly of mere submission 
to, partly of a refining upon, the authorised religious 
tradition: he calmly sophisticates this or that ele- 
ment of it which had seemed grotesque; and has, 
like any modern writer, a theory how myths were 



52 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

made, and how in lapse of time their first signification 
gets to be obscured among mortals; and what he sub- 
mits to, that he will also adorn fondly, by his genius 
for words. 

And that very neighbourhood afforded him his 
opportunity. It was in the neighbourhood of Pella, 
the Macedonian capital, that the worship of Dionysus, 
the newest of the gods, prevailed in its most extrava- 
gant form — the Thiasus^ or wild, nocturnal proces- 
sion of Bacchic women, retired to the woods and hills 
for that purpose, with its accompaniments of music, 
and lights, and dancing. Rational and moderate 
Athenians, as we may gather from some admissions 
of Euripides himself, somewhat despised all that; 
while those who were more fanatical forsook the 
home celebrations, and went on pilgrimage from 
Attica to Cithaeron or Delphi. But, at Pella persons 
of high birth took part in the exercise, and at a 
later period we read in Plutarch how Olympias, the 
mother of Alexander the Great, was devoted to this 
enthusiastic worship. Although in one of Botticelli's 
pictures the angels dance very sweetly, and may 
represent many circumstances actually recorded in 
the Hebrew scriptures, yet we hardly understand the 
dance as a religious ceremony; the bare mention of 
it sets us thinking on some fundamental differences 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 53 

between the pagan religions and our own. It is to 
such ecstasies, however, that all nature-worship seems 
to tend; that giddy, intoxicating sense of spring — 
that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the 
yearning life of the earth, having, apparently, in all 
times and places, prompted some mode of wild 
dancing. Coleridge, in one of his fantastic specu- 
lations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm 
— Schwarmereiy swarming, as he says, *^like the 
swarming of bees together" — has explained hc^ 
the sympathies of mere numbers, as such, the random 
catching on fire of one here and another there, when 
people are collected together, generates as if by mere 
contact, some new and rapturous spirit, not traceable 
in the individual units of a multitude. Such swarm- 
ing was the essence of that strange dance of the 
Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they 
follow, with motives, we may suppose, never quite 
made clear even to themselves, their new, strange, 
romantic god. Himself a woman-like god, — it was 
on women and feminine souls that his power mainly 
fell. At Elis, it was the women who had their own 
little song with which at spring-time they professed 
to call him from the sea: at Brasiae they had their 
own temple where none but women might enter; and 
so the Thiasiis^ also, is almost exclusively formed 



54 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

of women — of those who experience most directly 
the influence of things which touch thought through 
the senses — the presence of night, the expectation 
of morning, the nearness of wild, unsophisticated, 
natural things — the echoes, the coolness, the noise 
of frightened creatures as they climbed through the 
darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the 
disillusion, the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber 
which comes with the morning. Athenians visiting 
tbe Macedonian capital would hear, and from time 
to time actually see, something of a religious custom, 
in which the habit of an earlier world might seem to 
survive. As they saw the lights flitting over the 
mountains, and heard the wild, sharp cries of the 
women, there was presented, as a singular fact in 
the more prosaic actual life of a later time, an 
enthusiasm otherwise relegated to the wonderland 
of a distant past, in which a supposed primitive 
harmony and understanding between man and nature 
renewed itself. Later sisters of Centaur and Amazon, 
the Maenads, as they beat the earth in strange sym- 
pathy with its waking up from sleep, or as, in the 
description of the Messenger, in the play of Euripides, 
they lie sleeping in the glen, revealed among the morn- 
ing mists, were themselves indeed as remnants — 
flecks left here and there and not yet quite evaporated 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 55 

under the hard light of a later and commoner day 
— of a certain cloud-world which had once covered 
all things with a veil of "mystery. Whether or not, in 
what was often probably coarse as well as extravagant, 
there may have lurked some finer vein of ethical 
symbolism, such as Euripides hints at — the soberer 
influence, in the Thiasus, of keen air and animal 
expansion, certainly, for art, and a poetry delighting 
in colour and form, it was a custom rich in sugges- 
tion. The imitative arts would draw from it alto- 
gether new motives of freedom and energy, of freshness 
in old forms.X It is from this fantastic scene that the 
beautiful wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the 
heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian 
wall-painting and sarcophagus-frieze are originally 
derived; and that melting languor, that perfectly 
composed lassitude of the fallen Maenad, became a 
fixed type in the school of grace, the school of 
Praxiteles. 

The circumstances of the place thus combining 
with his peculiar motive, Euripides writes the Bac- 
chanals, It is this extravagant phase of religion, 
and the latest-born of the gods, which as an a7?iende 
honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek 
belief, he undertakes to interpret to an audience 
composed of people who, like Scyles, the Hellenising 



56 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek religion 
and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and 
partly relish that extravagance. Subject and audience 
alike stimulate the romantic temper, and the tragedy 
of the Bacchanals^ with its innovations in metre and 
diction, expressly noted as foreign or barbarous — 
all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing 
of the chorus, notwithstanding — with its subtleties 
and sophistications, its grotesques, mingled with and 
heightening a real shudder at the horror of the 
theme, and a peculiarly fine and human pathos, is 
almost wholly without the reassuring calm, generally 
characteristic of the endings of Greek tragedy: is 
itself excited, troubled, disturbing — a spotted or 
dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn-skins of 
its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty, 
twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild 
creature himself. Let us listen and watch the strange 
masks coming and going, for a while, as far as may 
be as we should do with a modern play. What are 
its charms? What is still alive, impressive, and 
really poetical for us, in the dim old Greek play? 
The scene is laid at Thebes, where the memory 
of Semele, the mother of Dionysus, is still under 
a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning against natural 
affection, pitiless over her pathetic death and finding 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 57 

in it only a judgment upon the impiety with which, 
having shamed herself with some mortal lover, she 
had thrown the blame of her sin upon Zeus, have, 
so far, triumphed over her. The true and glorious 
version of her story lives only in the subdued memory 
of the two aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her 
father Cadmus, apt now to let things go loosely by, 
who has delegated his royal power to Pentheus, the 
son of one of those sisters — a hot-headed and 
impious youth. So things had passed at Thebes; 
and now a strange circumstance has happened. An 
odd sickness has fallen upon the women: Dionysus 
has sent the sting of his enthusiasm upon them, and 
has pushed it to a sort of madness, a madness which 
imitates the true Thiasus, Forced to have the form 
without the profit of his worship, the whole female 
population, leaving distaff and spindle, and headed 
by the three princesses, have deserted the town, and 
are lying encamped on the bare rocks, or under the 
pines, among the solitudes of Cithaeron. And it is 
just at this point that the divine child, supposed to 
have perished at his mother's side in the flames, 
returns to his birthplace, grown to manhood. 

Dionysus himself speaks the prologue. He is on 
a journey through the world to found a new religion; 
and the first motive of this new religion is the vindi- 



58 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

cation of the memory of his mother. In explaining 
this design, Euripides, who seeks ahvays for pathetic 
effect, tells in few words, touching because simple, 
the story of Semele — here, and again still more 
intensely in the chorus which follows — the merely 
human sentiment of maternity being not forgotten, 
even amid the thought of the divine embraces of her 
fiery bed-fellow. It is out of tenderness for her 
that the son's divinity is to be revealed. A yearning 
affection, the affection with which we see him lifting 
up his arms about her, satisfied at last, on an old 
Etruscan metal mirror, has led him from place to 
place : everywhere he has had his dances and estab- 
lished his worship; and everywhere his presence has 
been her justification. First of all the towns in 
Greece he comes to Thebes, the scene of her sorrows : 
he is standing beside the sacred waters of Dirce and 
Ismenus: the holy place is in sight: he hears the 
Greek speech, and sees at last the ruins of the place 
of her lying-in, at once his own birth-chamber and 
his mother's tomb. His image, as it detaches itself 
little by little from the episodes of the play, and is 
further characterised by the songs of the chorus, has 
a singular completeness of symbolical effect. The 
incidents of a fully developed human personality are 
superinduced on the mystical and abstract essence 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 59 

of that fiery spirit in the flowing veins of the earth 
— the aroma of the green world is retained in the 
fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer ethical 
lights and shades — with a wonderful kind of subtlety. 
In the course of his long progress from land to land, 
the gold, the flowers, the incense of the East, have 
attached themselves deeply to him : their effect and 
expression rest now upon his flesh like the gleaming 
of that old ambrosial ointment of which Homer 
speaks as resting ever on the persons of the gods, 
and cling to his clothing — the mitre binding his 
perfumed yellow hair — the long tunic down to the 
white feet, somewhat womanly, and the fawn-skin, 
with its rich spots, wrapped about the shoulders. As 
the door opens to admit him, the scented air of the 
vineyards (for the vine-blossom has an exquisite per- 
fume) blows through; while the convolvulus on his 
mystic rod represents all wreathing flowery things 
whatever, with or without fruit, as in America all 
such plants are still called vines. " Sweet upon the 
mountains," the excitement of which he loves so 
deeply and to which he constantly invites his fol- 
lowers — "sweet upon the mountains," and pro- 
foundly amorous, his presence embodies all the 
voluptuous abundance of Asia, its beating sun, its 
"fair-towered cities, full of inhabitants/' which the 



60 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

chorus describe in their luscious vocabulary, with the 
rich Eastern names — Lydia, Persia, Arabia Felix: 
he is a sorcerer or an enchanter, the tyrant Pentheus 
thinks: the springs of water, the flowing of honey 
and milk and wine, are his miracles, wrought in 
person. 

We shall see presently how, writing for that 
northern audience, Euripides crosses the Theban 
with the gloomier Thracian legend, and lets the 
darker stain show through. Yet, from the first, amid 
all this floweriness, a touch or trace of that gloom 
is discernible. The fawn-skin, composed now so 
daintily over the shoulders, may be worn with the 
whole coat of the animal made up, the hoofs gilded 
and tied together over the right shoulder, to leave 
the right arm disengaged to strike, its head clothing 
the human head within, as Alexander, on some of his 
coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Her- 
cules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of 
Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached 
to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor 
merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but 
horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of 
the thyrsics, tossed about so wantonly by himself and 
his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover 
a spear-point; and the thing is a weapon — the sharp 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 61 

spear of the hunter Zagreus — though hidden now by 
the fresh leaves, and that button of pine-cone (useful 
also to dip in wine, to check the sweetness) which he 
has plucked down, coming through the forest, at 
peace for a while this spring morning. 

And the chorus emphasise this character, their 
songs weaving for the whole piece, in words more 
effective than any painted scenery, a certain con- 
gruous background which heightens all; the intimate 
sense of mountains and mountain things being in 
this way maintained throughout, and concentrated 
on the central figure. "He is sweet among the 
mountains," they say, "when he drops down upon 
the plain, out of his mystic musings" — and we may 
think we see the green festoons of the vine dropping 
quickly, from foot-place to foot-place, down the 
broken hill-side in spring, when like the Bacchanals, 
all who can, wander out of the town to enjoy the 
earliest heats. "Let us go out into the fields," we 
say; a strange madness seems to lurk among the 
flowers, ready to lay hold on us also; avriKa ya irao-a 
Xopev(T€L — soon the whole earth will dance and sing. 

Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and he 
comes from the east conducted by a chorus of 
gracious Lydian women, his true sisters — Bassarids, 
clad like himself in the long tunic, or bassara. 



62 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

They move and speak to the music of clangorous 
metallic instruments, cymbals and tambourines, re- 
lieved by the clearer notes of the pipe; and there 
is a strange variety of almost imitative sounds for 
such music, in their very words. The Homeric 
hymn to Demeter precedes the art of sculpture, but 
is rich in suggestions for it; here, on the contrary, 
in the first chorus of the Bacchanals, as elsewhere in 
the play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is 
probably borrowing something from art; that in these 
choruses, with their repetitions and refrains, he is 
reproducing perhaps the spirit of some sculptured 
relief which, like Luca della Robbia's celebrated 
work for the organ-loft of the cathedral of Florence, 
worked by various subtleties of line, not in the lips 
and eyes only, but in the drapery and hands also, 
to a strange reality of impression of musical effect 
on visible things. 

They beat their drums before the palace; and then 
a humorous little scene, a reflex of the old Dionysiac 
comedy — of that laughter which was an essential 
element of the earliest worship of Dionysus — follows 
the first chorus. The old blind prophet Teiresias, 
and the aged king Cadmus, always secretly true to 
him, have agreed to celebrate the Thiasiis, and accept 
his divinity openly. The youthful god has nowhere 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 63 

said decisively that he will have none but young men 
in his sacred dance. But for that purpose they must 
put on the long tunic, and that spotted skin which 
only rustics wear, and assume the thyrsus and ivy- 
crown. Teiresias arrives and is seen knocking at the 
doors. And then, just as in the medieval mystery, 
comes the inevitable grotesque, not unwelcome to 
our poet, who is wont in his plays, perhaps not 
altogether consciously, to intensify by its relief both 
the pity and the terror of his conceptions. At the 
summons of Teiresias, Cadmus appears, already 
arrayed like him in the appointed ornaments, in all 
their odd contrast with the infirmity and staidness of 
old age. Even in old men's veins the spring leaps 
again, and they are more than ready to begin danc- 
ing. But they are shy of the untried dress, and one 
of them is blind — ttoi Set ^opevuv ; Trot KaOtaTdvat 
TToSa ; Koi Kpara cretcrat ttoXlov ; and then the difficulty 
of the way! the long, steep journey to the glens! 
may pilgrims boil their peas? might they proceed to 
the place in carriages? At last, while the audience 
laugh more or less delicately at their aged fumblings, 
in some co-operative manner, the eyes of the one 
combining with the hands of the other, the pair are 
about to set forth. 

Here Pentheus is seen approaching the palace in 



64 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

extreme haste. He has been absent from home, and 
returning, has just heard of the state of things at 
Thebes — the strange malady of the women, the 
dancings, the arrival of the mysterious stranger: he 
finds all the women departed from the town, and sees 
Cadmus and Teiresias in masque. Like the exag- 
gerated diabolical figures in some of the religious 
plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an 
impersonation of stupid impiety, one of those whom 
the gods willing to destroy first infatuate. Alternat- 
ing between glib unwisdom and coarse mockery, 
between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, 
he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the 
whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so 
effeminate, so attractive of women with whom he 
remains day and night, but a poor sensual creature, 
and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indul- 
gence of their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather 
he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of 
having in view only some fresh source of professional 
profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled 
oracle; his petty spite avenges itself on the prophet 
by an order to root up the sacred chair, where he sits 
to watch the birds for divination, and disturb the 
order of his sacred place; and even from the moment 
of his entrance the mark of his doom seems already 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 65 

set upon him, in an impotent trembling which others 
notice in him. Those of the women who still 
loitered, he has already caused to be shut up in the 
common prison; the others, with Ino, Autonoe, and 
his own mother. Agave, he will hunt out of the glens; 
while the stranger is threatened with various cruel 
forms of death. But Teiresias and Cadmus stay to 
reason with him, and induce him to abide wisely 
with them; the prophet fittingly becomes the inter- 
preter of Dionysus, and explains the true nature of 
the visitor; his divinity, the completion or counter- 
part of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; all 
the soothing influences he brings with him; above 
all, his gift of the medicine of sleep to weary 
mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is already 
sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over 
it. Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So 
again, not without the laughter of the audience, 
supporting each other a little grotesquely against a 
fall, they get away at last. 

And then, again as in those quaintly carved and 
coloured imageries of the Middle Age — the martyr- 
dom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for instance, 
round the choir at Amiens — comes the full contrast, 
with a quite medieval simplicity and directness, be- 
tween the insolence of the tyrant, now at last in sight 



66 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

of his prey, and the outraged beauty of the youthful 
god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some 
fair wild creature in the snare of the hunter. Diony- 
sus has been taken prisoner; he is led on to the stage, 
with his hands bound, but still holding the thyrsus. 
Unresisting he had submitted himself to his captors; 
his colour had not changed; with a smile he had 
bidden them do their will, so that even they are 
touched with awe, and are almost ready to admit his 
divinity. Marvellously white and red, he stands 
there; and now, unwilling to be revealed to the un- 
worthy, and requiring a fitness in the receiver, he 
represents himself, in answer to the inquiries of Pen- 
theus, not as Dionysus, but simply as the god's 
prophet, in full trust in whom he desires to hear his 
sentence. Then the long hair falls to the ground 
under the shears; the mystic wand is torn from his 
hand, and he is led away to be tied up, like some 
dangerous wild animal, in a dark place near the 
king's stables. 

Up to this point in the play, there has been a 
noticeable ambiguity as to the person of Dionysus, 
the main figure of the piece; he is in part Dionysus, 
indeed; but in part, only his messenger, or minister 
preparing his way; a certain harshness of effect in 
the actual appearance of a god upon the stage being 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 67 

in this way relieved, or made easy, as by a gradual 
revelation in two steps. To Pentheus, in his invin- 
cible ignorance, his essence remains to the last un- 
revealed, and even the women of the chorus seem to 
understand in him, so far, only the forerunner of 
their real leader. As he goes away bound, therefore, 
they too, threatened also in their turn with slavery, 
invoke his greater original to appear and deliver 
them. In pathetic cries they reproach Thebes for 
rejecting them — tC fx dvacvet, tl fxe (j^evya^-, yet they 
foretell his future greatness; a new Orpheus, he will 
more than renew that old miraculous reign over ani- 
mals and plants. Their song is full of suggestions of 
wood and river. It is as if, for a moment, Dionysus 
became the suffering vine again; and the rustle of 
the leaves and water come through their words to 
refresh it. The fountain of Dirce still haunted by 
the virgins of Thebes, where the infant god was 
cooled and washed from the flecks of his fiery birth, 
becomes typical of the coolness of all springs, and 
is made, by a really poetic licence, the daughter of 
the distant Achelous — the earliest born, the father 
in myth, of all Greek rivers. 

A giddy sonorous scene of portents and surprises 
follows — a distant, exaggerated, dramatic reflex of 
that old thundering tumult of the festival in the vine- 



68 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

yard — in which Dionysus reappears, miraculously set 
free from his bonds. First, in answer to the deep- 
toned invocation of the chorus, a great voice is heard 
from within, proclaiming him to be the son of Semele 
and Zeus. Then, amid the short, broken, rapturous 
cries of the women of the chorus, proclaiming him 
master, the noise of an earthquake passes slowly; the 
pillars of the palace are seen waving to and fro; while 
the strange, memorial fire from the tomb of Semele 
blazes up and envelopes the whole building. The 
terrified women fling themselves on the ground; and 
then, at last, as the place is shaken open, Dionysus 
is seen stepping out from among the tottering masses 
of the mimic palace, bidding them arise and fear 
not. But just here comes a long pause in the action 
of the play, in which we must listen to a messenger 
newly arrived from the glens, to tell us what he has 
seen there, among the Maenads. The singular, some- 
what sinister beauty of this speech, and a similar one 
subsequent — a fair description of morning on the 
mountain-tops, with the Bacchic women sleeping, 
which turns suddenly to a hard, coarse picture of 
animals cruelly rent — is one of the special curiosi- 
ties which distinguish this play; and, as it is wholly 
narrative, I shall give it in English prose, abbreviat- 
ing, here and there, some details which seem to have 
but a metrical value : — 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 69 

" I was driving my herd of cattle to the summit of 
the scaur to feed, what time the sun sent forth his 
earliest beams to warm the earth. And lo ! three 
companies of women, and at the head of one of them 
Autonoe, thy mother Agave at the head of the second, 
and Ino at the head of the third. And they all slept, 
with limbs relaxed, leaned against the low boughs of 
the pines, or with head thrown heedlessly among the 
oak-leaves strewn upon the ground — all in the sleep 
of temperance, not, as thou saidst, pursuing Cypris 
through the solitudes of the forest, drunken with 
wine, amid the low rustling of the lotus-pipe. 

"And thy mother, when she heard the lowing of 
the kine, stood up in the midst of them, and cried to 
them to shake off sleep. And they, casting slumber 
from their eyes, started upright, a marv^el of beauty 
and order, young and old and maidens yet unmarried. 
And first, they let fall their hair upon their shoulders; 
and those whose cinctures were unbound re-composed 
the spotted fawn-skins, knotting them about with 
snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin. 
Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still swelling 
had left their babes behind, nursed in their arms 
antelopes, or wild whelps of wolves, and yielded 
them their milk to drink; and upon their heads they 
placed crowns of ivy or of oak, or of flowering con- 



70 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

volvulus. Then one, taking a thyrsus-wand, struck 
with it upon a rock, and thereupon leapt out a fine 
rain of water; another let down a reed upon the earth, 
and a fount of wine was sent forth there ; and those 
whose thirst was for a white stream, skimming the 
surface with their finger-tips, gathered from it abun- 
dance of milk; and from the ivy of the mystic wands 
streams of honey distilled. Verily ! hadst thou seen 
these things, thou wouldst have worshipped whom 
now thou revilest. 

"And we shepherds and herdsmen came together 
to question with each other over this matter — what 
strange and terrible things they do. And a certain 
wayfarer from the city, subtle in speech, spake to us 
— ^QJ dwellers upon these solemn ledges of the hills, 
will ye that we hunt dowai, and take, amid her revel- 
ries. Agave, the mother of Pentheus, according to the 
king's pleasure?' And he seemed to us to speak 
wisely; and we lay in wait among the bushes; and 
they, at the time appointed, began moving their 
wands for the Bacchic dance, calling wath one voice 
upon Bromius ! — lacchus ! — the son of Zeus ! and 
the whole mountain was moved with ecstasy together, 
and the wild creatures; nothing but was moved in 
their running. And it chanced that Agave, in her 
leaping, lighted near me, and I sprang from my 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 71 

hiding-place, willing to lay hold on her; and she 
groaned out, ^O! dogs of hunting, these fellows are 
upon our traces; but follow me! follow! with the 
mystic wands for weapons in your hands. ' And we, 
by flight, hardly escaped tearing to pieces at their 
hands, who thereupon advanced with knifeless fingers 
upon the young of the kine, as they nipped the green; 
and then hadst thou seen one holding a bleating 
calf in her hands, with udder distent, straining it 
asunder; others tore the heifers to shreds amongst 
them; tossed up and down the morsels lay in sight — 
flank or hoof — or hung from the fir-trees, dropping 
churned blood. The fierce, horned bulls stumbled 
forward, their breasts upon the ground, dragged on by 
myriad hands of young women, and in a moment the 
inner parts were rent to morsels. So, like a flock of 
birds aloft in flight, they retreat upon the level lands 
outstretched below, which by the waters of Asopus 
put forth the fair-flowering crop of Theban people 
— Hysiae and Erythrae — below the precipice of 
Cithaeron." — 

A grotesque scene follows, in which the humour we 
noted, on seeing those two old men diffidently set 
forth in chaplet and fawn-skin, deepens into a pro- 
found tragic irony. Pentheus is determined to go 



72 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

out in arms against the Bacchanals and put them to 
death, when a sudden desire seizes him to witness 
them in their encampment upon the mountains. 
Dionysus, whom he still supposes to be but a prophet 
or messenger of the god, engages to conduct him 
thither; and, for greater security among the danger- 
ous women, proposes that he shall disguise himself 
in female attire. As Pentheus goes within for that 
purpose, he lingers for a moment behind him, and 
in prophetic speech declares the approaching end; — 
the victim has fallen into the net; and he goes in to 
assist at the toilet, to array him in the ornaments 
which he will carry to Hades, destroyed by his own 
mother's hands. It is characteristic of Euripides — 
part of his fine tact and subtlety — to relieve and jus- 
tify what seems tedious, or constrained, or merely 
terrible and grotesque, by a suddenly suggested trait 
of homely pathos, or a glimpse of natural beauty, or 
a morsel of form or colour seemingly taken directly 
from picture or sculpture. So here, in this fantas- 
tic scene our thoughts are changed in a moment by 
the singing of the chorus, and divert for a while to 
the dark-haired tresses of the wood; the breath of the 
river-side is upon us; beside it, a fawn escaped from 
the hunter's net, is flying swiftly in its joy; like 
it, the Maenad rushes along; and we see the little 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 73 

head thrown back upon the neck, in deep aspiration, 
to drink in the dew. 

Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise, and 
comes forth tricked up with false hair and the dress 
of a Bacchanal; but still with some misgivings at the 
thought of going thus attired through the streets of 
Thebes, and with many laughable readjustments of 
the unwonted articles of clothing. And with the 
woman's dress, his madness is closing faster round 
him; just before, in the palace, terrified at the noise 
of the earthquake, he had drawn sword upon a mere 
fantastic appearance, and pierced only the empty 
air. Now he begins to see the sun double, and 
Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his con- 
ductor seems to him transformed into a wild beast; 
and now and then, we come upon some touches of a 
curious psychology, so that we might almost seem to 
be reading a modern poet. As if Euripides had 
been aware of a not unknown symptom of incipient 
madness (it is said) in which the patient, losing 
the sense of resistance, while lifting small objects 
imagines himself to be raising enormous weights, Pen- 
theus, as he lifts the thyrsus^ fancies he could lift 
Cithseron with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this 
the laughter of course will pass round the theatre; 
while those who really pierce into the purpose of the 



74 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

poet, shudder, as they see the victim thus gro- 
tesquely clad going to his doom, already foreseen 
in the ominous chant of the chorus — and as it 
were his grave-clothes, in the dress which makes 
him ridiculous. 

Presently a messenger arrives to announce that 
Pentheus is dead, and then another curious narrative 
sets forth the manner of his death. Full of wild, 
coarse, revolting details, of course not without pa- 
thetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving 
Maenads, and of their mountain solitudes — their 
trees and water — never quite forgotten, it de- 
scribes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred 
circle, Pentheus was fallen upon, like a wild beast, 
by the mystic huntresses and torn to pieces, his 
mother being the first to begin "the sacred rites 
of slaughter." 

And at last Agave herself comes upon the stage, 
holding aloft the head of her son, fixed upon the 
sharp end of the thyrsus, calling upon the women of 
the chorus to welcome the revel of the Evian god; 
who, accordingly, admit her into the company, pro- 
fessing themselves her fellow-revellers, the Baccha- 
nals being thus absorbed into the chorus for the rest 
of the play. For, indeed, all through it, the true, 
though partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 75 

Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus, 
staid and temperate for the moment, following Dio- 
nysus in his alternations, are but the paler sisters of 
his more wild and gloomy votaries — the true fol- 
lowers of the mystical Dionysus — the real chorus of 
Zagreus; the idea that their violent proceedings are 
the result of madness only, sent on them as a punish- 
ment for their original rejection of the god, being, 
as I said, when seen from the deeper motives of the 
myth, only a *^ sophism " of Euripides — a piece of 
rationalism of which he avails himself for the pur- 
pose of softening down the tradition of which he has 
undertaken to be the poet. Agave comes on the 
stage, then, bloodstained, exulting in her "victory 
of tears," still quite visibly mad indeed, and with 
the outward signs of madness, and as her mind wan- 
ders, musing still on the fancy that the dead head in 
her hands is that of a lion she has slain among the 
mountains — a young lion, she avers, as she notices 
the down on the young man's chin, and his abundant 
hair — a fancy in which the chorus humour her, will- 
ing to deal gently with the poor distraught creature. 
Supported by them, she rejoices "exceedingly, ex- 
ceedingly," declaring herself "fortunate" in such 
goodly spoil; priding herself that the victim has 
been slain, not with iron weapons, but with her own 



76 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

white fingers^ she summons all Thebes to come and 
behold. She calls for her aged father to draw near 
and see; and for Pentheus himself, at last, that he 
may mount and rivet her trophy, appropriately deco- 
rative there, between the triglyphs of the cornice 
below the roof, visible to all. 

And now, from this point onwards, Dionysus him- 
self becomes more and more clearly discernible as 
the hunter, a wily hunter, and man the prey he hunts 
for; "Our king is a hunter," cry the chorus, as they 
unite in Agave's triumph and give their sanction to 
her deed. And as the Bacchanals supplement the 
chorus, and must be added to it to make the concep- 
tion of it complete; so in the conception of Diony- 
sus also a certain transference, or substitution, must 
be made — much of the horror and sorrow of Agave, 
of Pentheus, of the whole tragic situation, must be 
transferred to him, if we wish to realise in the older, 
profounder, and more complete sense of his nature, 
that mystical being of Greek tradition to whom all 
these experiences — his madness, the chase, his im- 
prisonment and death, his peace again — really 
belong; and to discern which, through Euripides' 
peculiar treatment of his subject, is part of the 
curious interest of this play. 

Through the sophism of Euripides! For that, 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 77 

again, is the really descriptive word, with which 
Euripides, a lover of sophisms, as Aristophanes 
knows, himself supplies us. Well; — this softened 
version of the Bacchic madness is a sophism of 
Euripides; and Dionysus Omophagiis — the eater 
of raw flesh, must be added to the golden image of 
Dionysus Meilichius — the honey- sweet, if the old 
tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite of that 
sophism, our closing impression; if we are to catch, 
in its fulness, that deep under-current of horror which 
runs below, all through this masque of spring, and 
realise the spectacle of that wild chase, in which 
Dionysus is ultimately both the hunter and the 
spoil. 

But meantime another person appears on the stage; 
Cadmus enters, followed by attendants bearing on a 
bier the torn limbs of Pentheus, which, lying wildly 
scattered through the tangled wood, have been with 
difficulty collected and now decently put together and 
covered over. In the little that still remains before 
the end of the play, destiny now hurrying things rap- 
idly forward, and strong emotions, hopes and fore- 
bodings being now closely packed, Euripides has 
before him an artistic problem of enormous diffi- 
culty. Perhaps this very haste and close-packing of 
the matter, which keeps the mind from dwelling over- 



78 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 

much on detail, relieves its real extravagance, and 
those who read it carefully will think that the pathos 
of Euripides has been equal to the occasion. In a 
few profoundly designed touches he depicts the per- 
plexity of Cadmus, in whose house a god had become 
an inmate, only to destroy it — the regret of the old 
man for the one male child to whom that house had 
looked up as the pillar whereby aged people might 
feel secure; the piteous craziness of Agave; the un- 
conscious irony with which she caresses the florid, 
youthful head of her son; the delicate breaking of 
the thing to her reviving intelligence, as Cadmus, 
though he can but wish that she might live on for 
ever in her visionary enjoyment, prepares the way, 
by playing on that other horrible legend of the Theban 
house, the tearing of Actaeon to death — he too de- 
stroyed by a god. He gives us the sense of Agave's 
gradual return to reason through many glimmering 
doubts, till she wakes up at last to find the real face 
turned up towards the mother and murderess; the 
quite naturally spontaneous sorrow of the mother, 
ending with her confession, down to her last sigh, 
and the final breaking up of the house of Cadmus; 
with a result so genuine, heartfelt, .and dignified 
withal in its expression of a strange ineffable woe, 
that a fragment of it, the lamentation of Agave over 



THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 79 

her son, in which the long-pent agony at last finds 
vent, were, it is supposed, adopted into his paler 
work by an early Christian poet, and have figured 
since, as touches of real fire, in the Christies Patiens 
of Gregory Nazianzen. 



THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND 
PERSEPHONE 



No chapter in the history of human imagination is 
more curious than the myth of Demeter, and Kore 
or Persephone. Alien in some respects from the 
genuine traditions of Greek mythology, a relic of 
the earlier inhabitants of Greece, and having but a 
subordinate place in the religion of Homer, it yet 
asserted its interest, little by little, and took a com- 
plex hold on the minds of the Greeks, becoming 
finally the central and most popular subject of their 
national worship. Following its changes, we come 
across various phases of Greek culture, which are not 
without their likenesses in the modern mind. We 
trace it in the dim first period of instinctive popular 
conception; we see it connecting itself with many 
impressive elements of art, and poetry, and religious 
custom, with the picturesque superstitions of the 
many, and with the finer intuitions of the few; and 

80 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 81 

besides this, it is in itself full of interest and sugges- 
tion, to all for whom the ideas of the Greek religion 
have any real meaning in the modern world. And 
the fortune of the myth has not deserted it in later 
times. In the year 1780, the long-lost text of the 
Homeric Hymn to Demeter was discovered among 
the manuscripts of the imperial library at Moscow; 
and, in our own generation, the tact of an eminent 
student of Greek art. Sir Charles Newton, has restored 
to the world the buried treasures of the little temple 
and precinct of Demeter, at Cnidus, which have 
many claims to rank in the central order of Greek 
sculpture. The present essay is an attempt to select 
and weave together, for those who are now approach- 
ing the deeper study of Greek thought, whatever de- 
tails in the development of this myth, arranged with 
a view rather to a total impression than to the debate 
of particular points, may seem likely to increase their 
stock of poetical impressions, and to add to this 
some criticisms on the expression which it has left 
of itself in extant art and poetry. 

The central expression, then, of the story of De- 
meter and Persephone is the Homeric hymn, to which 
Grote has assigned a date at least as early as six hun- 
dred years before Christ. The one survivor of a 
whole family of hymns on this subject, it was written. 



82 THE MYTH OF 

perhaps, for one of those contests which took place 
on the seventh day of the Eleusinian festival, and 
in which a bunch of ears of corn was the prize ; per- 
haps, for actual use in the mysteries themselves, by 
the Hierophantes, or Interpreter, who showed to the 
worshippers at Eleusis those sacred places to which 
the poem contains so many references. About the 
composition itself there are many difficult questions, 
with various surmises as to why it has remained only 
in this unique manuscript of the end of the fourteenth 
century. Portions of the text are missing, and there 
are probably some additions by later hands; yet 
most scholars have admitted that it possesses some 
of the true characteristics of the Homeric style, some 
genuine echoes of the age immediately succeeding 
that which produced the Iliad and the Odyssey. 
Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated version of it. 

"I begin the song of Demeter" — says the prize- 
poet, or the Interpreter, the Sacristan of the holy 
places — " the song of Demeter and her daughter 
Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away by the 
consent of Zeus, as she played, apart from her mother, 
with the deep-bosomed daughters of the Ocean, 
gathering flowers in a meadow of soft grass — roses 
and the crocus and fair violets and flags, and hya- 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 83 

cinths, and, above all, the strange flower of the narcis- 
sus, which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, 
brought forth for the first time, to snare the footsteps 
of the flower-hke girl. A hundred heads of blossom 
grew up from the roots of it, and the sky and the 
earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the 
scent thereof. She stretched forth her hands to take 
the flower ; thereupon the earth opened, and the king 
of the great nation of the dead sprang out with his 
immortal horses. He seized the unwiUing girl, and 
bore her away weeping, on his golden chariot. She 
uttered a shrill cry, calling upon her father Zeus ; but 
neither man nor god heard her voice, nor even the 
nymphs of the meadow where she played ; except 
Hecate only, the daughter of Persaeus, sitting, as 
ever, in her cave, half veiled with a shining veil, 
thinking delicate thoughts ; she, and the Sun also, 
heard her. 

" So long as she could still see the earth, and the 
sky, and the sea with the great waves moving, and the 
beams of the sun, and still thought to see again her 
mother, and the race of the ever-living gods, so long 
hope soothed her, in the midst of her grief. The 
peaks of the hills and the depths of the sea echoed 
her cry. And the mother heard it. A sharp pain 
seized her at the heart ; she plucked the veil from her 



84 THE :^1YTH OF 

hair, and cast down the blue hood from her shoulders, 
and fled forth like a bird, seeking Persephone over 
dry land and sea. But neither man nor god would 
tell her the truth ; nor did any bird come to her as 
a sure messenger. 

" Nine days she wandered up and down upon the 
earth, having blazing torches in her hands ; and, in 
her great sorrow, she refused to taste of ambrosia, or 
of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her face. 
But when the tenth morning came, Hecate met her, 
having a hght in her hands. But Hecate had heard 
the voice only, and had seen no one, and could not 
tell Demeter who had borne the girl away. And 
Demeter said not a word, but fled away swiftly 
with her, having the blazing torches in her hands, till 
they came to the Sun, the watchman both of gods and 
men ; and the goddess questioned him, and the Sun 
told her the whole story. 

" Then a more terrible grief took possession of 
Demeter, and, in her anger against Zeus, she forsook 
the assembly of the gods and abode among men, for 
a long time veihng her beauty under a worn counte- 
nance, so that none who looked upon her knew her, 
until she came to the house of Celeus, who was then 
king of Eleusis. In her sorrow, she sat down at the 
wayside by the virgin's well, where the people of 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 85 

Eleusis come to draw water, under the shadow of an 
olive-tree. She seemed as an aged woman whose 
time of child-bearing is gone by, and from whom the 
gifts of Aphrodite have been withdrawn, like one of 
the hired servants, who nurse the children or keep 
house, in kings' palaces. And the daughters of Celeus, 
four of them, hke goddesses, possessing the flower of 
their youth, CaUidice, Cleisidice, Demo, and CaUithoe 
the eldest of them, coming to draw water that they 
might bear it in their brazen pitchers to their father's 
house, saw Demeter and knew her not. The gods are 
hard for men to recognise. 

" They asked her kindly what she did there, alone ; 
and Demeter answered, dissembhngly, that she was 
escaped from certain pirates, who had carried her 
from her home and meant to sell her as a slave. Then 
they prayed her to abide there while they returned to 
the palace, to ask their mother's permission to bring 
her home. 

*^ Demeter bowed her head in assent; and they, 
having filled their shining vessels with water, bore 
them away, rejoicing in their beauty. They came 
quickly to their father's house, and told their mother 
what they had seen and heard. Their mother bade 
them return, and hire the woman for a great price ; 
and they, like the hinds or young heifers leaping in 



86 THE MYTH OF 

the fields in spring, fulfilled with the pasture, holding 
up the folds of their raiment, sped along the hollow 
road-way, their hair, in colour like the crocus, floating 
about their shoulders as they went. They found the 
glorious goddess still sitting by the wayside, unmoved. 
Then they led her to their father's house ; and she, 
veiled from head to foot, in her deep grief, followed 
them on the way, and her blue robe gathered itself as 
she w^alked, in many folds about her feet. They came 
to the house, and passed through the sunny porch, 
where their mother, Metaneira, was sitting against one 
of the pillars of the roof, having a young child in her 
bosom. They ran up to her; but Demeter crossed 
the threshold, and, as she passed through, her head 
rose and touched the roof, and her presence filled the 
doorway with a divine brightness. 

" Still they did not wholly recognise her. After a 
time she was made to smile. She refused to drink 
wine, but tasted of a cup mingled of water and barley, 
flavoured with mint. It happened that Metaneira had 
lately' borne a child. It had come beyond hope, long 
after its elder brethren, and was the object of a 
peculiar tenderness and of many prayers with all. 
Demeter consented to remain, and become the nurse 
of this child. She took the child in her immortal 
hands, and placed it in her fragrant bosom ; and the 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 87 

heart of the mother rejoiced. Thus Demeter nursed 
Demophoon. And the child grew Hke a god, neither 
sucking the breast, nor eating bread ; but Demeter 
daily anointed it with ambrosia, as if it had indeed 
been the child of a god, breathing sweetly over it and 
holding it in her bosom ; and at nights, when she lay 
alone with the child, she would hide it secretly in the 
red strength of the fire, like a brand ; for her heart 
yearned towards it, and she would fain have given to 
it immortal youth. 

" But the fooHshness of his mother prevented it. 
For a suspicion growing up within her, she awaited 
her time, and one night peeped in upon them, and 
thereupon cried out in terror at what she saw. And 
the goddess heard her; and a sudden anger seizing 
her, she plucked the child from the fire and cast it on 
the ground, — the child she would fain have made 
immortal, but who must now share the common des- 
tiny of all men, though some inscrutable grace should 
still be his, because he had lain for a while on the 
knees and in the bosom of the goddess. 

"Then Demeter manifested herself openly. She 
put away the mask of old age, and changed her form, 
and the spirit of beauty breathed about her. A fra- 
grant odour fell from her raiment, and her flesh shone 
from afar ; the long yellow hair descended waving 



88 THE MYTH OF 

over her shoulders, and the great house was filled as 
with the brightness of lightning. She passed out 
through the halls ; and Metaneira fell to the earth, 
and was speechless for a long time, and remembered 
not to lift the child from the ground. But the sisters, 
hearing its piteous cries, leapt from their beds and 
ran to it. Then one of them lifted the child from 
the earth, and wrapped it in her bosom, and another 
hastened to her mother's chamber to awake her : 
they came round the child, and washed away the 
flecks of the fire from its panting body, and kissed 
it tenderly all about : but the anguish of the child 
ceased not ; the arms of other and different nurses 
were about to enfold it. 

" So, all night, trembling with fear, they sought to 
propitiate the glorious goddess ; and in the morning 
they told all to their father, Celeus. And he, accord- 
ing to the commands of the goddess, built a fair 
temple ; and all the people assisted ; and when it 
was finished every man departed to his own home. 
Then Demeter returned, and sat down within the 
temple-walls, and remained still apart from the com- 
pany of the gods, alone in her wasting regret for her 
daughter Persephone. 

" And, in her anger, she sent upon the earth a year 
of grievous famine. The dry seed remained hidden 



DELETER AND PERSEPHONE 89 

in the soil ; in vain the oxen drew the ploughshare 
through the furrows ; much white seed-corn fell 
fruitless on the earth, and the whole human race had 
like to have perished, and the gods had no more 
service of men, unless Zeus had interfered. First he 
sent Iris, afterwards all the gods, one by one, to turn 
Demeter from her anger ; but none was able to 
persuade her ; she heard their words with a hard 
countenance, and vowed by no means to return to 
Olympus, nor to yield the fruit of the earth, until 
her eyes had seen her lost daughter again. Then, 
last of all, Zeus sent Hermes into the kingdom of 
the dead, to persuade Aidoneus to suffer his bride to 
return to the hght of day. And Hermes found the 
king at home in his palace, sitting on a couch, beside 
the shrinking Persephone, consumed within herself 
by desire for her mother. A doubtful smile passed 
over the face of Aidoneus ; yet he obeyed the mes- 
sage, and bade Persephone return ; yet praying her a 
little to have gentle thoughts of him, nor judge him 
too hardly, who was also an immortal god. And Per- 
sephone arose up quickly in great joy ; only, ere she 
departed, he caused her to eat a morsel of sweet 
pomegranate, designing secretly thereby, that she 
should not remain always upon earth, but might some 
time return to him. And Aidoneus yoked the horses 



90 THE MYTH OF 

to his chariot; and Persephone ascended into it ; and 
Hermes took the reins in his hands and drove out 
through the infernal halls ; and the horses ran will- 
ingly ; and they two quickly passed over the ways of 
that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor 
of the rivers, nor the deep ravines of the hills, nor 
the chffs of the shore, resisting them ; till at last 
Hermes placed Persephone before the door of the 
temple where her mother was; who, seeing her, ran 
out quickly to meet her, like a maenad coming down 
a mountain- side, dusky with woods. 

'^ So they spent all that day together in intimate 
communion, having many things to hear and tell. 
Then Zeus sent to them Rhea, his venerable mother, 
the oldest of divine persons, to bring them back 
reconciled, to the company of the gods ; and he or- 
dained that Persephone should remain two parts of 
the year with her mother, and one third part only 
with her husband, in the kingdom of the dead. So 
Demeter suffered the earth to yield its fruits once 
more,' and the land was suddenly laden with leaves 
and flowers and waving corn. i\lso she visited 
Triptolemus and the other princes of Eleusi's, and 
instructed them in the performance of her sacred 
rites, — those mysteries of which no tongue may speak. 
Only, blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his 
lot after death is not as the lot of other men ! " 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 91 

In the story of Demeter, as in all Greek myths, we 
may trace the action of three different influences, 
which have moulded it with varying effects, in three 
successive phases of its development. There is first 
its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase, in 
which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living 
from mouth to mouth, and with details changing as it 
passes from place to place, there He certain primitive 
impressions of the phenomena of the natural world. We 
may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or literary, 
phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of 
the vague instinctive product of the popular imagina- 
tion, and handle it with a purely literary interest, fixing 
its outhnes, and simplifying or developing its situa- 
tions. Thirdly, the myth passes into the ethical phase, 
in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical 
narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because in- 
tensely characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual 
conditions. Behind the adventures of the stealing of 
Persephone and the wanderings of Demeter in search 
of her, as we find them in the Homeric hymn, we may 
discern the confused conception, under which that 
early age, in which the myths were first created, rep- 
resented to itself those changes in physical things, that 
order of summer and winter, of which it had no scien- 
tific, or systematic explanation, but in which, never- 



92 THE MYTH OF 

theless, it divined a multitude of living agencies, 
corresponding to those ascertained forces, of which 
our colder modern science tells the number and the 
names. Demeter — Demeter and Persephone, at 
first, in a sort of confused union — is the earth, in the 
fixed order of its annual changes, but also in all the 
accident and detail of the growth and decay of its 
children. Of this conception, floating loosely in the 
air, the poets of a later age take possession ; they 
create Demeter and Persephone as we know them in 
art and poetry. From the vague and fluctuating 
union, in which together they had represented the 
earth and its changes, the mother and the daughter 
define themselves with special functions, and with 
fixed, well-understood relationships, the incidents and 
emotions of which soon weave themselves into a pa- 
thetic story. Lastly, in proportion as the literary or 
aesthetic activity completes the picture or the poem^ 
the ethical interest makes itself felt. These strange 
persons — Demeter and Persephone, — these marvel- 
lous incidents — the translation into Hades, the seek- 
ing of Demeter, the return of Persephone to her, — 
lend themselves to the elevation and correction of 
the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the presentment 
to the senses and the imagination of an ideal expres- 
sion of them. Demeter cannot but seem the type of 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 93 

divine grief. Persephone is the goddess of death, yet 
with a promise of Hfe to come. Those three phases, 
then, which are more or less discernible in all 
mythical development, and constitute a natural order 
in it, based on the necessary conditions of human 
apprehension, are fixed more plainly, perhaps, than 
in any other passage of Greek mythology in the story 
of Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the cen- 
tral expression of its literary or poetical phase, so 
the marble remains, of which I shall have to speak 
by and bye, are the central extant illustration of what 
I have called its ethical phase. 

Homer, in the IHad, knows Demeter, but only as 
the goddess of the fields, the originator and patroness 
of the labours of the countryman, in their yearly order. 
She stands, with her hair yellow Hke the ripe corn, at 
the threshing-floor, and takes her share in the toil, the 
heap of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the 
wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields, she 
yields to the embraces of lasion, to the extreme jeal- 
ousy of Zeus, who slays her mortal lover with light- 
ning. The flowery town of Pyrasus — the wheat- fow7i, 
— an ancient place in Thessaly, is her sacred precinct. 
But when Homer gives a Hst of the orthodox gods, 
her name is not mentioned. 

Homer, in the Odyssey, knows Persephone also, 



94 THE MYTH OF 

but not as Kore ; only as the queen of the dead — 
iTraivY] Ilep(Te4>6vr} — dreadful Persephone, the goddess 
of destruction and death, according to the apparent 
import of her name. She accomplishes men's evil 
prayers ; she is the mistress and manager of men's 
shades, to which she can dispense a Httle more or less 
of life, dwelling in her mouldering palace on the steep 
shore of the Oceanus, with its groves of barren willows 
and tall poplars. But that Homer knew her as the 
daughter of Demeter there are no signs ; and of his 
knowledge of the rape of Persephone there is only the 
faintest sign, — he names Hades by the golden reins 
of his chariot, and his beautiful horses. 

The main theme, then, the most characteristic pecul- 
iarities, of the story, as subsequently developed, are 
not to be found, expressly, in the true Homer. We 
have in him, on the one hand, Demeter, as the per- 
fectly fresh and blithe goddess of the fields, whose 
children, if she has them, must be as the perfectly 
discreet and peaceful, unravished Kore ; on the other 
hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly terrible god- 
dess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous 
shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon 
Medusa in her keeping. And it is only when these 
two contrasted images have been brought into inti- 
mate relationship, only when Kore and Persephone 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 95 

have been identified, that the deeper mythology of 
Demeter begins. 

This combination has taken place in Hesiod ; and 
in three lines of the Theogony we find the stealing of 
Persephone by Aidoneus/ — one of those things in 
Hesiod, perhaps, which are really older than Homer. 
Hesiod has been called the poet of helots, and is 
thought to have preserved some of the traditions of 
those earlier inhabitants of Greece who had become 
a kind of serfs ; and in a certain shadowiness in his 
conceptions of the gods, contrasting with the concrete 
and heroic forms of the gods of Homer, we may per- 
haps trace something of the quiet unspoken brood- 
ing of a subdued people — of that silently dreaming 
temper to which the story of Persephone properly 
belongs. However this may be, it is in Hesiod that 
the two images, unassociated in Homer — the goddess 
of summer and the goddess of death, Kore and Per- 
sephone — are identified with much significance ; and 
that strange, dual being makes her first appearance, 
whose latent capabilities the poets afterwards devel- 
oped ; among the rest, a peculiar blending of those 
two contrasted aspects, full of purpose for the duly 

1 Theogony, 912-914: 

AvTCLp 6 ATfjjULTjrpos iro\v(p6p^7]s is X^xos fjXBev, 
7) t4k€ 'n.€pae<p6p7}p XevKivXevov, rjv ' Aidwveijs 
7jpTra(T€P ^s irapa fjLTjrpos ' edwKC 8^ ix-qrlera Zevs. 



96 THE MYTH OF 

chastened intelligence ; death, resurrection, rejuvenes- 
cence. — Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust I 

Modern science explains the changes of the natural 
world by the hypothesis of certain unconscious forces ; 
and the sum of these forces, in their combined action, 
constitutes the scientific conception of nature. But, 
side by side with the growth of this more mechanical 
conception, an older and more spiritual, Platonic, 
philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy 
more of instinct than of the understanding, the mental 
starting-point of which is not an observed sequence of 
outward phenomena, but some such feeling as most of 
us have on the first warmer days in spring, when we 
seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at 
work ; as if just below the mould, and in the hard 
wood of the trees, there were really circulating some 
spirit of life, akin to that which makes its energies 
felt within ourselves. Starting with a hundred in- 
stincts such as this, that older unmechanical, spiritual, 
or Platonic, philosophy envisages nature rather as the 
unity of a living spirit or person, revealing itself in 
various degrees to the kindred spirit of the observer, 
than as a system of mechanical forces. Such a phi- 
losophy is a systematised form of that sort of poetry 
(we may study it, for instance, either in Shelley or in 
Wordsworth), which also has its fancies of a spirit 



:TER and PERSEPHONE 97 

of tne earth, or of the sky, — a^ersonal intelligence 
abiding in them, the existence of which is assumed* 
in every suggestion such poetry makes to us of- 
a sympathy between the ways and aspects of outward- 
nature and the moods of men. And what stood to 
the primitive intelligence in place of such meta- 
physical conceptions were those cosmical stories or 
myths, such as this of Demeter and Persephone, 
which, springing up spontaneously in many mindsJ 
came at last to represent to them, in a certain numbei) 
of sensibly realised images, all they knew, felt, or 
fancied, of the natural world about them. The sky 
in its unity and its variety, — the sea in its unity and 
its variety, — mirrored themselves respectively in these 
simple, but profoundly impressible spirits, as Zeus, as 
Glaucus or Poseidon. And a large part of their 
experience — all, that is, that related to the earth in 
its changes, the growth and decay of all things born 
of it — was covered by the story of Demeter, the myth 
of the earth as a mother. They thought of Demeter 
as the old Germans thought of Hertha, or the later 
Greeks of Pan, as the Egyptians thought of Isis, the 
|and of the Nile, made green by the streams of 
bsiris, for whose coming Isis longs, as Demeter for 
Persephone ; thus naming together in her all their 
fluctuating thou ghts , impressions, suspicions, of the 

H 



98 THE MYTH OF 

earth and its appearances, their whole complex divi- 
nation of a mysterious life, a perpetual working, a 
continuous act of conception there. Or they thought 
of the many-coloured earth as the garment of De- 
meter, as the great modern pantheist poet speaks of 
it as the "garment of God." Its brooding fertility; 
the spring flowers breaking from its surface, the thinly 
disguised unhealthfulness of their heavy perfume, and 
of their chosen places of growth ; the dehcate, femi- 
nine, Proserpina-like motions of all growing things ; its 
fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh, reviving 
juices ; its sinister caprices also, its droughts and 
sudden volcanic heats ; the long delays of spring ; its 
dumb sleep, so suddenly flung away ; the sadness 
which insinuates itself into its languid luxuriance ; 
all this grouped itself round the persons of Demeter 
and her circle. They could turn always to her, from 
the actual earth itself, in aweful yet hopeful prayer, 
and a devout personal gratitude, and explain it 
through her, in its sorrow and its promise, its dark- 
ness and its helpfulness to man. 

The personification of abstract ideas by modern 
painters or sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of 
health, for instance, shocks, in most cases, the aes- 
thetic sense, as something conventional or rhetorical, 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 99 

as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech, 
which could please almost no one. On the other 
hand, such symbolical representations, under the form 
of human persons, as Giotto's Virtues and Vices at 
Padua, or his Saint Fove?^ty at Assisi, or the series 
of the planets in certain early Italian engravings, are 
profoundly poetical and impressive. They seem to 
be something more than mere symboHsm, and to be 
connected with some peculiarly sympathetic penetra- 
tion, on the part of the artist, into the subjects he 
intended to depict. SymboHsm intense as this, is 
the creation of a special temper, in which a certain 
simpHcity, taking all things literally, au pied de la 
lettre^ is united to a vivid pre-occupation with the 
aesthetic beauty of the image itself, the figured side 
of figurative expression, the forin of the metaphor. 
When it is said, " Out of his mouth goeth a sharp 
sword," that temper is ready to deal directly and 
boldly with that difficult image, like that old designer 
of the fourteenth century, who has depicted this, and 
other images of the Apocalypse, in a coloured window 
at Bourges. Such symboHsm cares a great deal for 
the hair of Temperance^ discreetly bound, for some 
subtler likeness to the colour of the sky in the girdle 
of Hope, for the inwoven flames in the red garment of 
Charity, And what was specially peculiar to the 



100 THE MYTH OF 

temper of the old Florentine painter, Giotto, to the 
temper of his age in general, doubtless, more than to 
that of ours, was the persistent and universal mood of 
the age in which the story of Demeter and Persephone 
was first created. If some painter of our own time 
has conceived the image of The Day so intensely, 
that we hardly think of distinguishing between the 
image, with its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and 
the meaning of the image ; if William Blake, to our 
so great delight, makes the morning stars literally 
" sing together " — these fruits of individual genius are 
in part also a "survival" from a different age, with 
the whole mood of which this mode of expression was 
more congruous than it is with ours. But there are 
traces of the old temper in the man of to-day also ; 
and through these we can understand that earlier 
time — a very poetical time, with the more highly 
gifted peoples — in which every impression men re- 
ceived of the action of powers without or within them 
suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like 
their own — a person, with a living spirit, and senses, 
and hands, and feet ; which, when it talked of the 
return of Kore to Demeter, or the marriage of Zeus and 
Here, was not using rhetorical language, but yielding 
to a real illusion ; to which the voice of man " was 
really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist." 



4 

DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 101 

The gods of Greek mythology overlap each other ; 
they are confused or connected with each other, 
lightly or deeply, as the case may be, and sometimes 
have their doubles, at first sight as in a troubled 
dream, yet never, when we examine each detail more 
closely, without a certain truth to human reason. It 
is only in a Hmited sense that it is possible to Hft, and 
examine by itself, one thread of the network of story 
and imagery, which, in a certain age of civihsation, 
wove itself over every detail of life and thought, over 
every name in the past, and almost every place in 
Greece. The story of Demeter, then, was the work 
of no single author or place or time ; the poet of its 
first phase was no single person, but the whole con- 
sciousness of an age, though an age doubtless with 
its differences of more or less imaginative individual 
minds — with one, here or there, eminent, though but 
by a little, above a merely receptive majority, the 
spokesman of a universal, though faintly-felt prepos- 
session, attaching the errant fancies of the people 
around him to definite names and images. The myth 
grew up gradually, and at many distant places, in 
many minds, independent of each other, but deaHng 
in a common temper with certain elements and 
aspects of the natural world, as one here, and another 
there, seemed to catch in that incident or detail which 



102 THE MYTH OF 

flashed more incisively than others on the inward eye, 
some influence, or feature, or characteristic of the 
great mother. The various epithets of Demeter, the 
local variations of her story, its incompatible incidents, 
bear witness to the manner of its generation. They^ 
illustrate that indefiniteness which is characteristic of 
Greek mythology, a theology with no central authority, 
no link on historic time, liable from the first to an 
unobserved transformation. They indicate the various, 
far-distant spots from which the visible body of the 
goddess slowly collected its constituents, and came at 
last to have a well-defined existence in the popular 
mind. In this sense, Demeter appears to one in her 
anger, sullenly withholding the fruits of the earth, to 
another in her pride of Persephone, to another in her 
grateful gift of the artspf agriculture to man ; at last only, 
is there a general recognition of a clearly- arrested out- 
line, a tangible embodiment, which has solidified itself 
in the imagination of the people, they know not how. 

. The worship of Demeter belongs to that older 
religion, nearer to the earth, which some have thought 
they could discern, behind the more definitely national 
mythology of Homer. She is the goddess of dark 
caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form. 
She gave men the first fig in one place, the first poppy 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 103 

in another ; in another, she first taught the old Titans 
to mow. She is the mother of the vine also; and 
the assumed name by which she called herself in her 
wanderings, is Dos — a gift ; the crane, as the har- 
binger of rain, is her messenger among the birds. 
She knows the magic powers of certain plants, cut 
from her bosom, to bane or bless ; and, under one of 
her epithets, herself presides over the springs, as also 
coming from the secret places of the earth. She is 
the goddess, then, at first, of the fertihty of the earth 
in its wildness ; and so far, her attributes are to some 
degree confused with those of the Thessalian Gaia 
and the Phrygian Cybele. Afterwards, and it is now 
that her most characteristic attributes begin to con- 
centrate themselves, she separates herself from these 
confused relationships, as specially the goddess of 
agriculture, of the fertility of the earth when furthered 
by human skill. She is the preserver of the seed 
sown in hope, under many epithets derived from the 
incidents of vegetation, as the simple countryman 
names her, out of a mind full of the various expe- 
riences of his Uttle garden or farm. She is the most 
definite embodiment of all those fluctuating mystical 
instincts, of which Gaia,^ the mother of the earth's 

1 In the Homeric hymn, pre-eminently, of the flower which grew 
up for the first time, to snare the footsteps of Kore, the fair but 
deadly Narcissus, the flower of vdpK-q, the numbness of death. 



104 THE MYTH OF 

gloomier offspring, is a vaguer and mistier one. There 
is nothing of the confused outline, the mere shadow- 
iness of mystical dreaming, in this most concrete 
human figure. No nation, less aesthetically gifted 
than the Greeks, could have thus hghtly thrown its 
mystical surmise and divination into images so clear 
and idyllic as those of the solemn goddess of the 
country, in whom the characteristics of the mother 
are expressed with so much tenderness, and the " beau- 
teous head " of Kore, then so fresh and peaceful. 

In this phase, then, the story of Demeter appears 
as the pecuhar creation of country-people of a high 
impressibility, dreaming over their work in spring or 
autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its 
sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it. For there 
is much in the life of the farm everywhere which 
gives to persons of any seriousness of disposition, 
special opportunity for grave and gentle thoughts. 
The temper of people engaged in the occupations 
of country life, so permanent, so ^^near to nature," is 
at all times alike ; and the habitual solemnity of 
thought and expression which Wordsworth found in 
the peasants of Cumberland, and the painter Frangois 
Millet in the peasants of Brittany, may well have had 
its prototype in early Greece. And so, even before 
the development, by the poets, of their aweful and 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 105 

passionate story, Demeter and Persephone seem to 
have been pre-eminently the venei-able, or aweftd, 
goddesses. Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when 
the young lambs are dropped ; she visits the barns in 
autumn ; she takes part in mowing and binding up the 
corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She presides 
over all the pleasant, significant details of the farm, 
the threshing-floor and the full granary, and stands 
beside the woman baking bread at the oven. With 
these fancies are connected certain simple rites ; the 
half-understood local observance, and the half-be- 
lieved local legend, reacting capriciously on each 
other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a 
morsel of meat, at the cross-roads, to take on her 
journey; and perhaps some real Demeter carries them 
away, as she wanders through the country. The inci- 
dents of their yearly labour become to them acts of 
worship ; they seek her blessing through many ex- 
pressive names, and almost catch sight of her, at dawn 
or evening, in the nooks of the fragrant fields. She 
lays a finger on the grass at the road-side, and some 
new flower comes up. All the picturesque implements 
of country life are hers ; the poppy also, emblem of an 
inexhaustible fertility, and full of mysterious juices for 
the alleviation of pain. The countrywoman who puts 
her child to sleep in the great, cradle-Hke basket for 



106 THE MYTH OF 

winnowing the corn, remembers Demeter Courotrophos,^ 
the mother of corn and children alike, and makes it 
a little coat out of the dress worn by its father at his 
initiation into her mysteries. Yet she is an angry 
goddess too, sometimes — Demeter Erimiys, the gob- 
hn of the neighbourhood, haunting its shadowy places. 
She lies on the ground out of doors on summer nights, 
and becomes wet with the dew. She grows young 
again every spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled 
woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse 
of Demophoon. Other lighter, errant stories nest 
themselves, as time goes on, within the greater. The 
water-newt, which repels the lips of the traveller who 
stoops to drink, is a certain urchin. Abas, who spoiled 
by his mockery the pleasure of the thirsting goddess, 
as she drank once of a wayside spring in her wander- 
ings. The night-owl is the transformed Ascalabus, 
who alone had seen Persephone eat that morsel of 
pomegranate, in the garden of Aidoneus. The bitter 
wild mint was once a girl, who for a moment had 
made, her jealous, in Hades. 

The episode of Triptolemus, to whom Demeter 
imparts the mysteries of the plough, like the details 
of some sacred rite, that he may bear them abroad to 
all people, embodies, in connexion with her, another 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 107 

group of the circumstances of country life. As with 
all the other episodes of the story, there are here 
also local variations, traditions of various favourites of 
the goddess at different places, of whom grammarians 
can tell us, finally obscured behind the greater fame 
of Triptolemus of Eleusis. One might fancy, at 
first, that Triptolemus was a quite Boeotian divinity, 
of the ploughshare. Yet we know that the thoughts 
of the Greeks concerning the culture of the earth 
from which they came, were most often noble ones ; 
and if we examine carefully the works of ancient 
art which represent him, the second thought will 
suggest itself, that there was nothing clumsy or coarse 
about this patron of the plough — something, rather, of 
the movement of delicate wind or fire, about him and 
his chariot. - And this finer character is explained, if, 
as we are justified in doing, we bring him into closest 
connexion with that episode, so full of a strange 
mysticism, of the Nuising of Deinophoon, in the 
Homeric hymn. For, according to some traditions, 
none other than Triptolemus himself was the subject 
of that mysterious experiment, in which Demeter laid 
the child nightly in the red heat of the fire ; and 
he lives afterwards, not immortal indeed, not wholly 
divine, yet, as Shakspere says, a '^nimble spirit," 
feeling little of the weight of the material world about 



108 THE MYTH OF 

him — the element of winged fire in the clay. The 
delicate, fresh farm-lad we may still actually see 
sometimes, like a graceful field-flower among the corn, 
becomes, in the sacred legend of agriculture, a king's 
son ; and then, the fire having searched out from him 
the grosser elements on that famous night, all com- 
pact now of spirit, a priest also, administering the 
gifts of Demeter to all the earth. Certainly, the 
extant works of art which represent him, gems or 
vase-paintings, conform truly enough to this ideal of 
a "nimble spirit," though he wears the broad country 
hat, which Hermes also wears, going swiftly, half on 
the airy, mercurial wheels of his farm instrument, 
harrow or plough — half on wings of serpents — the 
worm, symbolical of the soil, but winged, as sending 
up the dust committed to it, after subtle firing, in 
colours and odours of fruit and flowers. It is an alto- 
gether sacred character, again, that he assumes in 
another precious work, of the severer period of Greek 
art, lately discovered at Eleusis, and now preserved in 
the museum of Athens, a singularly refined bas-relief, 
in which he stands, a firm and serious youth, between 
Demeter and Persephone, who places her hand as 
with some sacred influence, and consecrating gesture, 
upon him. 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 109 

But the house of the prudent countryman will be, 
of course, a place of honest manners ; and Demeter 
Thesrnophoros is the guardian of married life, the deity 
of the discretion of wives. She is therefore the 
founder of civilised order. The peaceful homes of 
men, scattered about the land, in their security — 
Demeter represents these fruits of the earth also, not 
without a suggestion of the white cities, which shine 
upon the hills above the waving fields of corn, seats of 
justice and of true kingship. She is also in a certain 
sense the patron of travellers, having, in her long 
wanderings after Persephone, recorded and handed 
down those omens, caught from little things — the 
birds which crossed her path, the persons who met 
her on the way, the words they said, the things they 
carried in their hands, etVdSta o-v/x/SoAa — by noting 
which, men bring their journeys to a successful end ; 
so that the simple countryman may pass securely on 
his way ; and is led by signs from the goddess herself, 
when he travels far to visit her, at Hermione or 
Eleusis. 

So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are 
similar. In the mythical conception, as in the rehg- 
ious acts connected with it, the mother and the 
daughter are almost interchangeable ; they are the 
two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually, the office 



no THE MYTH OF 

of Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions 
distinct from those of Demeter are attributed to her. 
Hitherto, always at the side of Demeter and sharing 
her worship, she now appears detached from her, 
going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third 
part of the year she abides in darkness ; she comes up 
in the spring ; and every autumn, when the country- 
man sows his seed in the earth, she descends thither 
again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring and 
autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone, then, is 
the summer-time, and, in this sense, a daughter of the 
earth ; but the summer as bringing winter ; the flowery 
splendour and consummated glory of the year, as 
thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its 
end, as the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first 
severer wind. She is the last day of spring, or the first 
day of autumn, in the threefold division of the Greek 
year. Her story is, indeed, but the story, in an 
intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus — 
the king's blooming son, fated, in the story of He- 
rodotus, to be wounded to death with an iron spear — 
of Linus, a fair child who is torn to pieces by hounds 
every spring-time — of the Enghsh Sleeping Beauty. 
From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, 
she becomes the goddess of night and sleep and death, 
confuseable with Hecate, the goddess of midnight 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 111 

terrors, — Koprj app-qro^, the mother of the Erinnyes, 
who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approach- 
ing death, upbraiding him because he had made no 
hymn in her praise, which swan's song he thereupon 
began, but finished with her. She is a twofold 
goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of 
these two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, 
respectively. A duality, an inherent opposition in 
the very conception of Persephone, runs all through 
her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There is 
ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous 
identity : hence the many euphemisms of later 
language concerning her. 

The "worship of sorrow," as Goethe called it, is 
sometimes supposed to have had almost no place in 
the religion of the Greeks. Their religion has been 
represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the 
worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, 
conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments 
of its own joyous activity. It helped to hide out of 
their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of 
which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep 
them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy 
places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagina- 
tion of the middle age ; and it hardly proposed to 
itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, were 



112 THE MYTH OF 

never " sick or sorry." But this familiar view of Greek 
religion is based on a consideration of a part only of 
what is known concerning it, and really involves a 
misconception, akin to that which under-estimates the 
influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek 
poetry and art ; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively 
with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives 
of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, 
permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps 
somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a concep- 
tion of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central ex- 
pressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities ; 
and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps 
the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to 
show that the " worship of sorrow " was not without 
its function in Greek religion ; their legend is a legend 
made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people ; 
while the most important artistic monuments of that 
legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was 
really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting 
by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the 
elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of 
a matter, at first sight painful and strange. 

The student of origins^ as French critics say, of the 
earliest stages of art and poetry, must be content to 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 113 

follow faint traces ; and in what has been here said, 
much may seem to have been made of little, with too 
much completion, by a general framework or setting, 
of what after all are but doubtful or fragmentary indi- 
cations. Yet there is a certain cynicism too, in that 
over-positive temper, which is so jealous of our catch- 
ing any resemblance in the earlier world to the thoughts 
that really occupy our own minds, and which, in its 
estimate of the actual fragments of antiquity, is con- 
tent to find no seal of human intelligence upon them. 
Slight indeed in themselves, these fragmentary indica- 
tions become suggestive of much, when viewed in 
the light of such general evidence about the human 
imagination as is afforded by the theory of " com- 
parative mythology," or what is called the theory of 
" animism." Only, in the application of these theories, 
the student of Greek religion must never forget that, 
after all, it is with poetry, not with systematic theo- 
logical belief or dogma, that he has to do. As regards 
this story of Demeter and Persephone, what we actually 
possess is some actual fragments of poetry, some actual 
fragments of sculpture ; and with a curiosity, justified 
by the direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we 
feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of the 
poet-people, \vith which the ingenuity of modern theory 
has filled the void in our knowledge. The abstract 
I 



114 THE MYTH OF 

poet of that first period of mythology, creating in this 
wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way, — the ab- 
stract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind; 
and, in speaking o*f this poetical age, we must take 
heed, before all things, in no sense to misconstrue the 
poets. 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 115 



II. 

The stories of the Greek mythology, like other 
things which belong to no man, and for which no one 
in particular is responsible, had their fortunes. In 
that world of floating fancies there was a struggle for 
life; there were myths which never emerged from 
that first stage of popular conception, or were absorbed 
by stronger competitors, because, as some true heroes 
have done, they lacked the sacred poet or prophet, 
and were never remodelled by literature ; while, out of 
the myth of Demeter, under the careful conduct of 
poetry and art, came the little pictures, the idylls, 
of the Homeric hymn, and the gracious imagery of 
Praxiteles. The myth has now entered its second 
or poetical phase, then, in which more definite fancies 
are grouped about the primitive stock, in a conscious 
Hterary temper, and the whole interest settles round 
the images of the beautiful girl going down into the 
darkness, and the weary woman who seeks her lost 
daughter — divine persons, then sincerely believed in 
by the majority of the Greeks. The Homeric hymn 
is the central monument of this second phase. In it, 
the changes of the natural year have become a per- 



116 THE MYTH OF 

sonal history, a story of human affection and sorrow, 
yet with a far-reaching religious significance also, of 
which the mere earthly spring and autumn are but an 
analogy ; and in the development of this human ele- 
ment, the writer of the hymn sometimes displays a 
genuine power of pathetic expression. The whole 
episode of the fostering of Demophoon, in which over 
the body of the dying child human longing and regret 
are blent so subtly with the mysterious design of the 
goddess to make the child immortal, is an excellent 
example of the sentiment of pity in literature. Yet 
though it has reached the stage of conscious literary 
interpretation, much of its early mystical or cosmical 
character still lingers about the story, as it is here told. 
Later mythologists simply define the personal history j 
but in this hymn we may, again and again, trace curi- 
ous links of connexion with the original purpose of the 
myth. Its subject is the weary woman, indeed, our 
Lady of Sorrows, the mate7' dolorosa of the ancient 
world, but with a certain latent reference, all through, 
to the mystical person of the earth. Her robe of 
dark blue is the raiment of her mourning, but also 
the blue robe of the earth in shadow, as we see it 
in Titian's landscapes; her great age is the age of 
the immemorial earth ; she becomes a nurse, there- 
fore, holding Demophoon in her bosom ; the folds of 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 117 

her garment are fragrant, not merely with the incense 
of Eleusis, but with the natural perfume of flowers and 
fruit. The sweet breath with which she nourishes 
the child Demophoon, is the warm west wind, feeding 
all germs of vegetable hfe ; her bosom, where he lies, 
is the bosom of the earth, with its strengthening heat, 
reserved and shy, offended if human eyes scrutinise too 
closely its secret chemistry ; it is with the earth's natu- 
ral surface of varied colour that she has, '^ in time past, 
given pleasure to the sun " ; the yellow hair which 
falls suddenly over her shoulders, at her transformation 
in the house of Celeus, is still partly the golden corn ; 
— in art and poetry she is ever the blond goddess ; 
tarrying in her temple, of which an actual hollow in 
the earth is the prototype, among the spicy odours of 
the Eleusinian ritual, she is the spirit of the earth, 
lying hidden in its dark folds until the return of 
spring, among the flower-seeds and fragrant roots, 
hke the seeds and aromatic woods hidden in the 
wrappings of the dead. Throughout the poem, we 
have a sense of a certain nearness to nature, surviving 
from an earlier world ; the sea is understood as 
a person, yet is still the real sea, with the waves 
moving. When it is said that no bird gave Demeter 
tidings of Persephone, we feel that to that earlier 
world, ways of communication between all creatures 



118 THE MYTH OF 

may have seemed open, which are closed to us. It 
is Iris who brings to Demeter the message of Zeus ; 
that is, the rainbow signifies to the earth the good- 
will of the rainy sky towards it. Persephone springing 
up with great joy from the couch of Aidoneus, to return 
to her mother, is the sudden outburst of the year. The 
heavy and narcotic aroma of spring flowers hangs about 
her, as about the actual spring. And this mingling of 
the primitive cosmical import of the myth with the 
later, personal interests of the story, is curiously illus- 
trated by the place which the poem assigns to Hecate. 
This strange Titaness is, first, a nymph only ; after- 
wards, as if changed incurably by the passionate cry 
of Persephone, she becomes her constant attendant, 
and is even identified with her. But in the Homeric 
hymn her lunar character is clear ; she is really the 
moon only, who hears the cry of Persephone, as the 
sun saw her, when Aidoneus carried her away. One 
morning, as the mother wandered, the moon appeared, 
as it does in its last quarter, rising very bright, just be- 
fore dawn ; that is, in the words of the Homeric hymn, 
— ^^ on the tenth morning Hecate met her, having a 
light in her hands." The fascinating, but enigmatical 
figure, '^ sitting ever in her cave, half- veiled with a 
shining veil, thinking delicate thoughts,", in which 
we seem to see the subject of some picture of the 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 119 

Italian Renaissance, is but the lover of Endymion — 
like Persephone, withdrawn, in her season, from the 
eyes of men. The sun saw her ; the moon saw her 
not, but heard her cry, and is ever after the half-veiled 
attendant of the queen of dreams and of the dead. 

But the story of Demeter and Persephone lends 
itself naturally to description, and it is in descriptive 
beauties that the Homeric hymn excels ; its episodes 
are finished designs, and directly stimulate the painter 
and the sculptor to a rivalry with them. Weaving the 
names of the flowers into his verse, names familiar to 
us in English, though their Greek originals are uncer- 
tain, the writer sets Persephone before us, herself like 
one of them — KaXvKCjTns — like the budding calyx of 
a flower, — in a picture, which, in its mingling of a 
quaint freshness and simplicity with a certain earnest- 
ness, reads like a description of some early Florentine 
design, such as Sandro Botticelli's A//egory of the Sea- 
sons. By an exquisite chance also, a common metri- 
cal expression connects the perfume of the newly- 
created narcissus with the salt odour of the sea. Like 
one of those early designs also, but with a deeper 
infusion of religious earnestness, is the picture of 
Demeter sitting at the wayside, in shadow as always, 
with the well of water and the olive-tree. She has 
been journeying all night, and now it is morning, and 



120 THE MYTH OF 

the daughters of Celeus bring their vessels to draw 
water. That image of the seated Demeter, resting 
after her long flight "through the dark continent," or 
in the house of Celeus, when she refuses the red wine, 
or again, solitary, in her newly-finished temple of 
Eleusis, enthroned in her grief, fixed itself deeply on 
the Greek imagination, and became a favourite subject 
of Greek artists. When the daughters of Celeus 
come to conduct her to Eleusis, they come as in a 
Greek frieze, full of energy and motion and waving 
Hnes, but with gold and colours upon it. Eleusis — 
coniifig — the coining of Demeter thither, as -thus told 
in the Homeric hymn, is the central instance in Greek 
mythology of such divine appearances. '' She leaves 
for a season the company of the gods and abides among 
men " ; and men's merit is to receive her in spite of 
appearances. Metaneira and others, in the Homeric 
hymn, partly detect her divine character ; they find 
Xapt? — a certain gracious air — about her, which 
makes them think her, perhaps, a royal person in dis- 
guise. She becomes in her long wanderings almost 
wholly humanised, and in return, she and Persephone, 
alone of the Greek gods, seem to have been the ob- 
jects of a sort of personal love and loyalty. Yet they 
are ever the solemn goddesses, — Btal o-eixval, — the 
word expressing religious awe, the Greek sense of the 
divine presence. 



DEMLTER AND PERSEPHONE 121 

Plato, in laying down the rules by which the poets 
are to be guided in speaking about divine things to the 
citizens of the ideal repubhc, forbids all those episodes 
of mythology which represent the gods as assuming 
various forms, and visiting the earth in disguise. Below 
the express reasons which he assigns for this rule, we 
may perhaps detect that instinctive antagonism to the 
old Heraclitean philosophy of perpetual change, which 
forces him, in his theory of morals and the state, of 
poetry and music, of dress and manners even, and of 
style in the very vessels and furniture of daily hfe, on 
an austere simpHcity, the older Dorian or Egyptian 
type of a rigid, eternal immobihty. The disintegrating, 
centrifugal influence, w^hich had penetrated, as he 
thought, political and social existence, making men too 
myriad-minded, had laid hold on the life of the gods 
also, and, even in their calm sphere, one could hardly 
identify a single divine person as himself, and not 
another. There must, then, be no doubling, no dis- 
guises, no stories of transformation. The modern 
reader, however, will hardly acquiesce in this '' im- 
provement " of Greek mythology. He finds in these 
stories, like that, for instance, of the appearance of 
Athene to Telemachus, in the first book of the Odys- 
sey, which has a quite biblical mysticity and solemnity, 
— stories in which, the hard material outline breaking 



122 THE MYTH OF 

up, the gods lay aside their visible form hke a garment, 
yet remain essentially themselves, — not the least spir- 
itual element of Greek religion, an evidence of the 
sense therein of unseen presences, which might at any 
moment cross a man's path, to be recognised, in half 
disguise, by the more delicately trained eye, here or 
there, by one and not by another. Whatever religious 
elements they lacked, they had at least this sense of 
subtler and more remote ways of personal presence. 

And as there are traces in the Homeric hymn of 
the primitive cosmical myth, relics of the first stage of 
the development of the story, so also many of its inci- 
dents are probably suggested by the circumstances 
and details of the Eleusinian ritual. There were re- 
ligious usages before there were distinct religious con- 
ceptions, and these antecedent rehgious usages shape 
and determine, at many points, the ultimate religious 
conception, as the details of the myth interpret or 
explain the religious custom. The hymn relates the 
legend of certain holy places, to which various impres- 
sive religious rites had attached themselves — the holy 
well, the old fountain, the stone of sorrow, which it 
was the office of the " interpreter " of the holy places 
to show to the people. The sacred way which led 
from Athens to Eleusis was rich in such memorials. 
The nine days of the wanderings of Demeter in the 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 123 

Homeric hymn are the nine days of the duration of 
the greater or autumnal mysteries ; the jesting of the 
old woman lambe, who endeavours to make Demeter 
smile, are the customary mockeries with which the 
worshippers, as they rested on the bridge, on the 
seventh day of the feast, assailed those who passed 
by. The torches in the hands of Demeter are bor- 
rowed from the same source ; and the shadow in 
which she is constantly represented, and which is the 
peculiar sign of her grief, is partly ritual, and a relic 
of the caves of the old Chthonian worship, partly 
poetical — expressive, half of the dark earth to which 
she escapes from Olympus, half of her mourning. 
She appears consistently, in the hymn, as a teacher 
of rites, transforming daily life, and the processes of 
life, into a religious solemnity. With no misgiving as 
to the proprieties of a mere narration, the hymn-writer 
mingles these symbolical imitations with the outlines 
of the original story ; and, in his Demeter, the dra- 
matic person of the mysteries mixes itself with the 
primitive mythical figure. And the worshipper, far 
from being offended by these interpolations, may have 
found a special impressiveness in them, as they linked 
continuously its inner sense with the outward imagery 
of the ritual. 

And, as Demeter and her story embodied them- 



124 THE MYTH OF 

selves gradually in the Greek imagination, so these 
mysteries in which her worship found its chief ex- 
pression, grew up little by little, growing always in 
close connexion with the modifications of the story, 
sometimes prompting them, at other times suggested 
by them. That they had a single special author is 
improbable, and a mere invention of the Greeks, 
ignorant of their real history and the general analogy 
of such matters. Here again, as in the story itself, 
the idea of development, of degrees, of a slow and 
natural growth, impeded here, diverted there, is the 
illuminating thought which earlier critics lacked. 
"No tongue may speak of them," says the Homeric 
hymn ; and the secret has certainly been kept. The 
antiquarian, deahng, letter by letter, with what is 
recorded of them, has left few certain data for the 
reflexion of the modern student of the Greek rehgion ; 
and of this, its central solemnity, only a fragmentary 
picture can be made. It is probable that these mys- 
teries developed the symbolical significance of the 
story of the descent into Hades, the coming of 
Demeter to Eleusis, the invention of Persephone. 
They may or may not have been the vehicle of 
a secret doctrine, but were certainly an artistic spec- 
tacle, giving, like the mysteries of the middle age, a 
dramatic representation of the sacred story, — perhaps 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 125 

a detailed performance, perhaps only such a conven- 
tional representation, as was afforded for instance by 
the medieval ceremonies of Palm Sunday ; the whole, 
probably, centering in an image of Demeter — the 
work of Praxiteles or his school, in ivory and gold. 
There is no reason to suppose any specific difference 
between the observances of the Eleusinian festival and 
the accustomed usages of the Greek religion ; noc- 
turns, libations, quaint purifications, processions — 
are common incidents of all Greek worship ; in all 
religious ceremonies there is an element of dramatic 
symbolism ; and what we really do see, through those 
scattered notices, are things which have their parallels 
in a later age, the whole being not altogether unlike 
a modern pilgrimage. The exposition of the sacred 
places — the threshing-floor of Triptolemus, the rocky 
seat on which Demeter had rested in her sorrow, the 
well of Callichorus — is not so strange, as it would 
seem, had it no modern illustration. The libations, 
at once a watering of the vines and a drink-offering 
to the dead — still needing men's services, waiting for 
purification perhaps, or thirsting, like Dante's Adam 
of Brescia, in their close homes — must, to almost all 
minds, have had a certain natural impressiveness ; and 
a parallel has sometimes been drawn between this festi- 
val and All Souls' Day. 



126 THE MYTH OF 

And who, everywhere, has not felt the mystical 
influence of that prolonged silence, the mystic silence, 
from which the very word *^ mystery " has its origin? 
Something also there undoubtedly was, which coarser 
minds might misunderstand. On one day, the initiated 
went in procession to the sea-coast, where they under- 
went a purification by bathing in the sea. On the fifth 
night there was the torchlight procession ; and, by a 
touch of real life in him, we gather from the first page 
of Plato's Republic that such processions were popular 
spectacles, having a social interest, so that people 
made much of attending them. There was the pro- 
cession of the sacred basket filled with poppy-seeds 
and pomegranates. There was the day of rest, after 
the stress and excitement of the ^^ great night/' On 
the sixth day, the image of lacchus, son of Demeter, 
crowned with myrtle and having a torch in its hand, 
was carried in procession, through thousands of spec- 
tators, along the sacred way, amid joyous shouts and 
songs. We have seen such processions ; we under- 
stand how many different senses, and how lightly, 
various spectators may put on them; how Httle defi- 
nite meaning they may have even for those who offici- 
ate in them. Here, at least, there was the image itself, 
in that age, with its close connexion between religion 
and art, presumably fair. Susceptibility to the im- 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 127 

pressions of religious ceremonial must always have 
varied with the peculiarities of individual temperament, 
as it varies in our own day ; and Eleusis, with its 
incense and sweet singing, may have been as little 
interesting to the outward senses of some worshippers 
there, as the stately and affecting ceremonies of the 
medieval church to many of its own members. In a 
simpler yet profounder sense than has sometimes been 
supposed, these things were really addressed to the 
initiated only.^ 

We have to travel a long way from the Homeric 
hymn to the hymn of CaUimachus, who writes in the 
end of Greek literature, in the third century before 
Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred 
basket of Demeter, not at the Attic, but at the Alex- 
andrian Eleusinia. He developes, in something of the 
prosaic spirit of a medieval writer of '* mysteries," one 
of the burlesque incidents of the story, the insatiable 
hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he cut 
down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he finds his 
opportunities for skilful touches of poetry ; — " As the 
four white horses draw her sacred basket," he says, " so 
will the great goddess bring us a white spring, a 7vhite 
summer." He describes the grove itself, with its hedge 

1 The great Greek myths are, in truth, hke abstract forces, which 
ally themselves to various conditions. 



128 THE MYTH OF 

of trees, so thick that an arrow could hardly pass 
through, its pines and fruit-trees and tall poplars within, 
and the water, like pale gold, running from the con- 
duits. It is one of those famous poplars that receives 
the first stroke ; it sounds heavily to its companion 
trees, and Demeter perceives that her sacred grove is 
suffering. Then comes one of those transformations 
which Plato will not allow. Vainly anxious to save the 
lad from his ruin, she appears in the form of a priest- 
ess, but with the long hood of the goddess, and the 
poppy in her hand ; and there is something of a real 
shudder, some still surviving sense of a haunting pres- 
ence in the groves, in the verses which describe her 
sudden revelation, when the workmen flee away, leav- 
ing their axes in the cleft trees. 

Of the same age as the hymn of Callimachus, but 
with very different qualities, is the idyll of Theocritus 
on the Shepherds' Journey. Although it is possible to 
define an epoch in mythological development in which 
literary and artificial influences began to remodel the 
primitive, popular legend, yet still, among children, 
and unchanging childlike people, we may suppose that 
that primitive stage always survived, and the old, in- 
stinctive influences were still at work. As the subject 
of popular religious celebrations also, the myth was 
still the property of the people, and surrendered to its 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 129 

capricious action. The shepherds in Theocritus, on 
their way to celebrate one of the more homely feasts 
of Demeter, about the time of harvest, are examples 
of these childlike people ; the age of the poets has 
long since come, but they are of the older and simpler 
order, lingering on in the midst of a more self-con- 
scious world. In an idyll, itself full of the delightful 
gifts of Demeter, Theocritus sets them before us ; 
through the blazing summer day's journey, the smiHng 
image of the goddess is always before them ; and now 
they have reached the end of their journey : — 

" So I, and Eucritus, and the fair xA.myntichus, turned 
aside into the house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with 
delight in beds of sweet tamarisk and fresh cuttings 
from the vines, strewn on the ground. Many poplars 
and elm- trees were waving over our heads, and not far 
off the running of the sacred water from the cave of 
the nymphs warbled to us ; in the shimmering branches 
the sun-burnt grasshoppers were busy with their talk, 
and from afar the Httle owl cried softly, out of the 
tangled thorns of the blackberry ; the larks were sing- 
ing and the hedge-birds, and the turtle-dove moaned ; 
the bees flew round and round the fountains, murmur- 
ing softly ; the scent of late summer and of the fall of 
the year was everywhere ; the pears fell from the trees 
at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at our 

K 



130 THE MYTH OF 

sides, and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth 
with the weight of their fruit. The wax, four years 
old, was loosed from the heads of the wine-jars. O ! 
nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Par- 
nassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this 
that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the 
stony cave of Pholus? Was it nectar like this that 
made the mighty shepherd on Anapus' shore, Poly- 
phemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships, dance 
among his sheepfolds ? — A cup like this ye poured 
out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over 
the threshing-floor. May it be mine, once more, to 
dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of corn ; 
and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies 
and handfuls of corn in her two hands ! " 

Some of the modifications of the story of Demeter, 
as we find it in later poetry, have been supposed to 
be due, not to the genuine action of the Greek mind, 
but to the influence of that so-called Orphic literature, 
which, in the generation succeeding Hesiod, brought, 
from Thessaly and Phrygia, a tide of mystical ideas 
into the Greek religion, sometimes, doubtless, con- 
fusing the clearness and naturalness of its original 
outlines, but also sometimes imparting to them a new 
and peculiar grace. Under the influence of this Orphic 
poetry, Demeter was blended, or identified, with Rhea 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 131 

Cybele, the mother of the gods, the wilder earth- 
goddess of Phrygia ; and the romantic figure of 
Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus the Hunter, that most 
interesting, though somewhat melancholy variation 
on the better known Dionysus, was brought, as son 
or brother of Persephone, into her circle, the mystical 
vine, who, as Persephone descends and ascends from 
the earth, is rent to pieces by the Titans every year 
and remains long in Hades, but every spring-time 
comes out of it again, renewing his youth. This 
identification of Demeter with Rhea Cybele is the 
motive which has inspired a beautiful chorus in the 
Helena — the new Helena — of Euripides, that great 
lover of all subtle refinements and modernisms, who, 
in this play, has worked on a strange version of the 
older story, which relates that Helen had never really 
gone to Troy at all, but sent her soul only there, apart 
from her sweet body, which abode all that time in 
Egypt, at the court of King Proteus, where she is 
found at last by her husband Menelaus, so that the 
Trojan war was about a phantom, after all. The 
chorus has even less than usual to do with the action 
of the play, being linked to it only by a sort of 
parallel, which may be understood, between Menelaus 
seeking Helen, and Demeter seeking Persephone. 
Euripides, then, takes the matter of the Homeric 



132 THE MYTH OF 

hymn into the region of a higher and swifter poetry, 
and connects it with the more stimulating imagery 
of the Idaean mother. The Orphic mysticism or 
enthusiasm has been admitted into the story, which 
is now full of excitement, the motion of rivers, 
the sounds of the Bacchic cymbals heard over the 
mountains, as Demeter wanders among the woody 
valleys seeking her lost daughter, all directly expressed 
in the vivid Greek words. Demeter is no longer the 
subdued goddess of the quietly-ordered fields, but the 
mother of the gods, who has her abode in the heights 
of Mount Ida, who presides over the dews and waters 
of the white springs, whose flocks feed, not on grain, 
but on the curling tendrils of the vine, both of which 
she withholds in her anger, and whose chariot is 
drawn by wild beasts, fruit and emblem of the earth 
in its fiery strength. Not Hecate, but Pallas and 
Artemis, in full armour, swift-footed, vindicators of 
chastity, accompany her in her search for Persephone, 
who is already expressly, Koprj apprjTo<i — '^ the maiden 
whom none may name." When she rests from her 
long wanderings, it is into the stony thickets of 
Mount Ida, deep with snow, that she throws her- 
self, in her profound grief. When Zeus desires to 
end her pain, the Muses and the " solemn " Graces 
are sent to dance and sing before her. It is then that 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 133 

Cypris, the goddess of beauty, and the original cause, 
therefore, of her distress, takes into her hands the 
brazen tambourines of the Dionysiac worship with their 
Chthonian or deep-noted sound; and it is she, not 
the old lambe, who with this wild music, heard thus 
for the first time, makes Demeter smile at last. 
" Great," so the chorus ends with a picture, " great is 
the power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and the 
green leaves of ivy twisted about the sacred wands, 
and the wheeling motion of the tambourine whirled 
round in the air, and the long hair floating unbound 
in honour of Bromius, and the nocturns of the god- 
dess, when the moon looks full upon them." 

The poem of Claudian on the Rape of Proserpine, 
the longest extant work connected with the story 
of Demeter, yet itself unfinished, closes the world of 
classical poetry. Writing in the fourth century of 
the Christian era, Claudian has his subject before 
him in the whole extent of its various development, 
and also profits by those many pictorial representa- 
tions of it, which, from the famous picture of Polyg- 
notus downwards, delighted the ancient world. His 
poem, then, besides having an intrinsic charm, is 
valuable for some reflexion in it of those lost works, 
being itself pre-eminently a work in colour, and excel- 
ling in a kind of painting in words, which brings its 



134 THE MYTH OF 

subject very pleasantly almost to the eye of the reader. 
The mind of this late votary of the old gods, in a 
world rapidly changing, is crowded with all the beau- 
tiful forms generated by mythology, and now about to 
be forgotten. In this after-glow of Latin literature, 
lighted up long after their fortune had set, and just 
before their long night began, they pass before us, in 
his verses, with the utmost clearness, like the figures 
in an actual procession. The nursing of the infant 
Sun and Moon by Tethys ; Proserpine and her com- 
panions gathering flowers at early dawn, when the 
violets are drinking in the dew, still lying white upon 
the grass ; the image of Pallas winding the peaceful 
blossoms about the steel crest of her helmet ; the 
realm of Proserpine, softened somewhat by her com- 
ing, and filled with a quiet joy ; the matrons of 
Elysium crowding to her marriage toilet, with the 
bridal veil of yellow in their hands ; the Manes, 
crowned with ghostly flowers yet warmed a little, 
at the marriage feast ; the ominous dreams of the 
mother ; the desolation of the home, like an empty 
bird's-nest or an empty fold, when she returns and finds 
Proserpine gone, and the spider at work over her 
unfinished embroidery ; the strangely-figured raiment, 
the flowers in the grass, which were once blooming 
youths, having both their natural colour and the 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 135 

colour of their poetry in them, and the clear little 
fountain there, which was once the maiden Cyane ; — 
all this is shown in a series of descriptions, like the 
designs in some unwinding tapestry, like Proserpine's 
own embroidery, the description of which is the most 
brilliant of these pictures, and, in its quaint confusion 
of the images of philosophy with those of mythology, 
anticipates something of the fancy of the Italian Re- 
naissance. 

^' Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her 
low song, was working a gift against the return of 
her mother, with labour all to be in vain. In it, she 
marked out with her needle the houses of the gods 
and the series of the elements, showing by what law, 
nature, the parent of all, settled the strife of ancient 
times, and the seeds of things disparted into their 
places; the lighter elements are borne aloft, the 
heavier fall to the centre ; the air grows bright with 
heat, a blazing light whirls round the firmament ; 
the sea flows ; the earth hangs suspended in its place. 
And there were divers colours in it ; she illuminated 
the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into the 
water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers ; 
and, under her skilful hand, the threads, with their 
inwrought lustre, swell up, in momentary counterfeit 
of the waves; you might think that the sea- wind 



136 THE MYTH OF 

flapped against the rocks, and that a hollow murmur 
came creepmg over the thirsty sands. She puts in 
the five zones, marking with a red ground the mid- 
most zone, possessed by burning heat ; its outline was 
parched and stiff; the threads seemed thirsty with 
the constant sunshine ; on either side lay the two 
zones proper for human life, where a gentle temper- 
ance reigns ; and at the extremes she drew the twin 
zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad 
with the hues of perpetual frost. She paints in, too, 
the sacred places of Dis, her father's brother, and the 
Manes, so fatal to her ; and an omen of her doom 
was not wanting ; for, as she worked, as if with fore- 
knowledge of the future, her face became wet with 
a sudden burst of tears. And now, in the utmost 
border of the tissue, she had begun to wind in the 
wavy line of the river Oceanus, with its glassy shal- 
lows ; but the door sounds on its hinges, and she 
perceives the goddesses coming ; the unfinished work 
drops from her hands, and a ruddy blush lights up in 
her clear and snow-white face." 

I have reserved to the last what is perhaps the 
daintiest treatment of this subject in classical litera- 
ture, the account of it which Ovid gives in the Fasti 
— a kind of Roman Calendar — for the seventh of 
April, the day of the games of Ceres. He tells over 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 137 

again the old story, with much of which, he says, the 
reader will be already familiar ; but he has something 
also of his own to add to it, which the reader will 
hear for the first time ; and, like one of those old 
painters who, in depicting a scene of Christian history, 
drew from their own fancy or experience its special 
setting and accessories, he translates the story into 
something very different from the Homeric hymn. 
The writer of the Homeric hymn had made Celeus a 
king, and represented the scene at Eleusis in a fair 
palace, like the Venetian painters who depict the per- 
sons of the Holy Family with royal ornaments. Ovid, 
on the other hand, is more hke certain painters of the 
early Florentine school, who represent the holy per- 
sons amid the more touching circumstances of humble 
life ; and the special something of his own which he 
adds, is a pathos caught from homely things, not 
without a dehghtful, just perceptible, shade of humour 
even, so rare in such work. All the mysticism has 
disappeared ; but, instead, we trace something of that 
" worship of sorrow," which has been sometimes sup- 
posed to have had no place in classical religious senti- 
ment. In Ovid's well-finished elegiacs, Persephone's 
flower-gathering, the Anthology^ reaches its utmost 
delicacy; but I give the following episode for the 
sake of its pathetic expression. 



138 THE MYTH OF 

" After many wanderings Ceres was come to Attica. 
There, in the utmost dejection, for the first time, she 
sat down to rest on a bare stone, which the people of 
Attica still call the stone of soi-roiv. For many days 
she remained there motionless, under the open sky, 
heedless of the rain and of the frosty moonlight. 
Places have their fortunes ; and what is now the illus- 
trious town of Eleusis was then the field of an old 
man named Celeus. He was carrying home a load of 
acorns, and wild berries shaken down from the bram- 
bles, and dry wood for burning on the hearth ; his 
little daughter was leading two goats home from the 
hills ; and at home there was a little boy lying sick in 
his cradle. 'Mother,' said the little girl — and the 
goddess was moved at the name of mother — ' what 
do you, all alone, in this solitary place ? ' The old man 
stopped too, in spite of his heavy burden, and bade 
her take shelter in his cottage, though it was but a little 
one. But at first she refused to come ; she looked 
like an old woman, and an old woman's coif confined 
her hair ; and as the man still urged her, she said to 
him, * Heaven bless you; and may children always be 
yours ! My daughter has been stolen from me. Alas ! 
how much happier is your lot than mine ; ' and, though 
weeping is impossible for the gods, as she spoke, a 
bright drop, like a tear, fell into her bosom. Soft- 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 139 

hearted, the Uttle girl and the old man weep together. 
And after that the good man said, ^ Arise ! despise not 
the shelter of my little home ; so may the daughter 
whom you seek be restored to you.' ' Lead me,' 
answered the goddess ; ^ you have found out the secret 
of moving me ; ' and she arose from the stone, and 
followed the old man ; and as they went he told her 
of the sick child at home — how he is restless with 
pain, and cannot sleep. And she, before entering the 
little cottage, gathered from the untended earth the 
soothing and sleep-giving poppy ; and as she gathered 
it, it is said that she forgot her vow, and tasted of the 
seeds, and broke her long fast, unaware. As she came 
through the door, she saw the house full of trouble, for 
now there was no more hope of life for the sick boy. 
She saluted the mother, whose name was Metaneira, 
and humbly kissed the lips of the child, with her own 
lips ; then the paleness left its face, and suddenly the 
parents see the strength returning to its body ; so great 
is the force that comes from the divine mouth. And 
the whole family was full of joy — the mother and the 
father and the little girl ; they were the whole house- 
hold."^ 

Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive 

1 With this may be connected another passage of Ovid — Meta- 
viorphoses ; v. 391-408. 



140 THE MYTH OF 

sacred figures, have now defined themselves for the 
Greek imagination, condensed from all the traditions 
which have now been traced, from the hymns of the 
poets, from the instinctive and unformulated mysticism 
of primitive minds. Demeter is become the divine 
sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of summer, is 
become Persephone, the goddess of death, still associ- 
ated with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit, 
yet as one risen from the dead also, presenting one side 
of her ambiguous nature to men's gloomier fancies. 
Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter enthroned, 
chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age, 
blessing the earth, in her joy at the return of Kore. 
The myth has now entered on the third phase of its 
life, in which it becomes the property of those more 
elevated spirits, who, in the decline of the Greek relig- 
ion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect freedom 
of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister 
to their culture. In this way, the myths of the Greek 
rehgion become parts of an ideal, visible embodiments 
of the susceptibilities and intuitions of the nobler kind 
of souls ; and it is to this latest phase of mythological 
development that the highest Greek sculpture allies 
itself. Its function is to give visible aesthetic expres- 
sion to the constituent parts of that ideal. As poetry 
dealt chiefly with the incidents of the story, so it is 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 141 

with the personages of the story — with Demeter and 
Kore themselves — that sculpture has to do. 

For the myth of Demeter, Hke the Greek rehgion in 
general, had its unlovelier side, grotesque, unhellenic, 
unglorified by art, illustrated well enough by the de- 
scription Pausanias gives us of his visit to the cave of 
the Black Demeter at Phigalia. In his time the image 
itself had vanished ; but he tells us enough about it to 
enable us to realise its general characteristics, mon- 
strous as the special legend with which it was con- 
nected, the black draperies, the horse's head united to 
the woman's body, with the carved reptiles creeping 
about it. If, with the thought of this gloomy image 
of our mother the earth, in our minds, we take up one 
of those coins which bear the image of Kore or De- 
meter,^ we shall better understand what the function 
of sculpture really was, in elevating and refining the 
religious conceptions of the Greeks. Looking on the 
profile, for instance, on one of those coins of Messene, 
which almost certainly represent Demeter, and noting 
the crisp, chaste opening of the lips, the minutely 
wrought earrings, and the delicately touched ears of 
corn, — this trifling object being justly regarded as, in 
its aesthetic qualities, an epitome of art on a larger 

1 On these small objects the mother and daughter are hard to 
distinguish, the latter being recognisable only by a greater delicacy 
in the features and the more evident stamp of youth. 



142 THE MYTH OF 

scale, — we shall see how far the imagination of the 
Greeks had travelled from what their Black Demeter 
shows us had once been possible for them, and in 
making the gods of their worship the objects of a 
worthy companionship in their thoughts. Certainly, 
the mind of the old workman who struck that coin was, 
if we may trust the testimony of his work, unclouded 
by impure or gloomy shadows. The thought of De- 
meter is impressed here^ with all the purity and pro- 
portion, the purged and dainty intelligence of the 
human countenance. The mystery of it is indeed 
absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked for in 
so shght a thing, intended for no sacred purpose, and 
tossed lightly from hand to hand. But in his firm hold 
on the harmonies of the human face, the designer of 
this tranquil head of Demeter is on the one road to a 
command over the secrets of all imaginative pathos 
and mystery ; though, in the perfect fairness and 
blitheness of his work, he might seem almost not to 
have known the incidents of her terrible story. 

It is probable that, at a later period than in other 
equally important temples of Greece, the earHer ar- 
chaic representation of Demeter in the sanctuary of 
Eleusis, was replaced by a more beautiful image in the 
new style, with face and hands of ivory, having there- 
fore, in tone and texture, some subtler likeness to 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 143 

women's flesh, and the closely enveloping drapery 
being constructed in daintily beaten plates of gold. 
Praxiteles seems to have been the first to bring into 
the region of a freer artistic handling these shy deities 
of the earth, shrinking still within the narrow restraints 
of a hieratic, conventional treatment, long after the 
more genuine Olympians had broken out of them. 
The school of Praxiteles, as distinguished from that of 
Pheidias, is especially the school of grace, relaxing a 
little the severe ethical tension of the latter, in favour 
of a slightly Asiatic sinuosity and tenderness. Pausa- 
nius tells us that he carved the two goddesses for the 
temple of Demeter at Athens ; and Pliny speaks of two 
groups of his in brass, the one representing the stealing 
of Persephone, the other her later, annual descent into 
Hades, conducted thither by the now pacified mother. 
All alike have perished ; though perhaps some more or 
less faint reflexion of the most important of these 
designs may still be traced on many painted vases 
which depict the stealing of Persephone, — a helpless, 
plucked flower in the arms of Aidoneus. And in this 
almost traditional form, the subject was often repre- 
sented, in low reHef, on tombs, some of which still 
remain ; in one or two instances, built up, oddly 
enough, in the walls of Christian churches. On the 
tombs of women who had died in earlv Hfe, this was a 



144 THE MYTH OF 

favourite subject, some likeness of the actual lineaments 
of the deceased being sometimes transferred to the 
features of Persephone. 

Yet so far, it might seem, when we consider the 
interest of this story in itself, and its importance in the 
Greek rehgion, that no adequate expression of it had 
remained to us in works of art. But in the year 1857, 
the discovery of the marbles, in the sacred precinct of 
Demeter at Cnidus, restored to us an illustration of 
the myth in its artistic phase, hardly less central than 
the Homeric hymn in its poetical phase. With the 
help of the descriptions and plans of Mr. Newton's 
book,^ we can form, as one always wishes to do in 
such cases, a clear idea of the place where these 
marbles — three statues of the best style of Greek 
sculpture, now in the British Museum — were found. 
Occupying a ledge of rock, looking towards the sea, 
at the base of a chff of upheaved limestone, of singu- 
lar steepness and regularity of surface, the spot pre- 
sents indications of volcanic disturbance, as if a chasm 
in the earth had opened here. It was this character, 
suggesting the belief in an actual connexion with the 
interior of the earth, (local tradition claiming it as the 
scene of the stealing of Persephone,) which probably 

1 A History of Discoveries at Halicaj-nassus, Cnidus^ and Bra7i- 
chidcB, 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 145 

gave rise, as in other cases where the landscape pre- 
sented some peculiar feature in harmony with the 
story, to the dedication upon it of a house and an 
image of Demeter, with whom were associated Kore 
and ^^the gods with Demeter " — ol Ocol irapa Aa/xarpt 
— Aidoneus, and the mystical or Chthonian Dionysus. 
The house seems to have been a small chapel only, of 
simple construction, and designed for private use, the 
site itself having been private property, consecrated 
by a particular family, for their own religious uses, 
although other persons, servants or dependents of the 
founders, may also have frequented it. The architect- 
ure seems to have been insignificant, but the sculpture 
costly and exquisite, belonging, if contemporary with 
the erection of the building, to a great period of Greek 
art, of which also it is judged to possess intrinsic 
marks — about the year 350 before Christ, the proba- 
ble date of the dedication of the httle temple. The 
artists by whom these works were produced were, 
therefore, either the contemporaries of Praxiteles, 
whose Venus was for many centuries the glory of 
Cnidus, or belonged to the generation immediately 
succeeding him. The temple itself was probably 
thrown down by a renewal of the volcanic disturb- 
ances ; the statues however remaining, and the minis- 
ters and worshippers still continuing to make shift for 



146 THE MYTH OF 

their sacred business in the place, now doubly vener- 
able, but with its temple unrestored, down to the 
second or third century of the Christian era, its fre- 
quenters being now perhaps mere chance comers, the 
family of the original donors having become extinct, 
or having deserted it. Into this later arrangement, 
clearly divined by Mr. Newton, through those faint 
indications which mean much for true experts, the 
extant remains, as they were found upon the spot, 
permit us to enter. It is one of the graves of that old 
religion, but with much still fresh in it. We see it 
with its provincial superstitions, and its curious magic 
rites, but also with its means of really solemn impres- 
sions, in the culminating forms of Greek art ; the two 
faces of the Greek religion confronting each other 
here, and the whole having that rare peculiarity of 
a kind of personal stamp upon it, the place having 
been designed to meet the fancies of one particular 
soul, or at least of one family. It is always difficult to 
bring the every-day aspect of Greek religion home 
to us ; but even the slighter details of this little sanc- 
tuary help us to do this ; and knowing so little, as we 
do, of the greater mysteries of Demeter, this glance 
into an actual religious place dedicated to her, and 
with the air of her worship still about it, is doubly 
interesting. The little votive figures of the goddesses, 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 147 

in baked earth, were still lying stored in the small 
treasury intended for such objects, or scattered about 
the feet of the images, together with lamps in great 
number, a lighted lamp being a favourite offering, in 
memory of the torches with which Demeter sought 
Persephone, or from some sense of inherent darkness 
in these gods of the earth ; those torches in the hands 
of Demeter being indeed originally the artificial warmth 
and brightness of lamp and fire, on winter nights. The 
dircE or spells, — KardSeafjiOL — binding or devoting 
certain persons to the infernal gods, inscribed on thin 
rolls of lead, with holes, sometimes, for hanging them 
up about those quiet statues, still lay, just as they were 
left, anywhere within the sacred precinct, illustrating 
at once the gloomier side of the Greek religion in 
general, and of Demeter and Persephone especially, 
in their character of avenging deities, and, as relics of 
ancient magic, reproduced so strangely at other times 
and places, reminding us of the permanence of certain 
odd ways of human thought. A woman binds with 
her spell the person who seduces her husband away 
from her and her children ; another, the person who 
has accused her of preparing poison for her husband ; 
another devotes one who has not restored a borrowed 
garment, or has stolen a bracelet, or certain drinking- 
horns ; and, from some instances, we might infer that 



148 THE ^lYTH OF 

this was a favourite place of worship for the poor and 
ignorant. In this Hving picture, we find still lingering 
on, at the foot of the beautiful Greek marbles, that 
phase of religious temper which a cynical mind might 
think a truer Hnk of its unity and permanence than 
any higher aesthetic instincts — a phase of it, which 
the art of sculpture, humanising and refining man's 
conceptions of the unseen, tended constantly to do 
away. For the higher side of the Greek rehgion, thus 
humanised and refined by art, and elevated by it to 
the sense of beauty, is here also. 

There were three ideal forms, as we saw, gradually 
shaping themselves in the development of the story 
of Demeter, waiting only for complete reahsation at 
the hands of the sculptor ; and now, with these forms 
in our minds, let us place ourselves in thought before 
the three images which once probably occupied the 
three niches or ambries in the face of that singular 
cliff at Cnidus, one of them being then wrought on a 
larger scale. Of the three figures, one probably rep- 
resents Persephone, as the goddess of the dead ; the 
second, Demeter enthroned ; the third is probably a 
portrait-statue of a priestess of Demeter, but may 
perhaps, even so, represent Demeter herself, Demeter 
Achcea, Ceres Deserta, the mate)- doloi^osa of the 
Greeks, a type not as yet recognised in any other 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 149 

work of ancient art. Certainly, it seems hard not to 
believe that this work is in some way connected with 
the legend of the place to which it belonged, and the 
main subject of which it realises so completely ; and, 
at least, it shows how the higher Greek sculpture would 
have worked out this motive. If Demeter at all, it is 
Demeter the seeker, — At^w, — as she was called in 
the mysteries, in some pause of her restless wandering 
over the world in search of the lost child, and become 
at last an abstract type of the wanderer. The Ho- 
meric hymn, as we saw, had its sculptural motives, the 
great gestures of Demeter, who was ever the stately 
goddess, as she followed the daughters of Celeus, or 
sat by the well-side, or went out and in, through the 
halls of the palace, expressed in monumental words. 
With the sentiment of that monumental Homeric 
presence this statue is penetrated, uniting a certain 
solemnity of attitude and bearing, to a profound pite- 
ousness, an unrivalled pathos of expression. There is 
something of the pity of Michelangelo's mater dolo- 
rosa, in the wasted form and marred countenance, yet 
with the light breaking faintly over it from the eyes, 
which, contrary to the usual practice in ancient sculpt- 
ure, are represented as looking upwards. It is the 
aged woman who has escaped from pirates, who has 
but just escaped being sold as a slave, calling on the 



150 THE MYTH OF 

young for pity. The sorrows of her long wanderings 
seem to have passed into the marble ; and in this too, 
it meets the demands which the reader of the Homeric 
hymn, with its command over the resources of human 
pathos, makes upon the sculptor. The tall figure, in 
proportion above the ordinary height, is veiled, and 
clad to the feet in the longer tunic, its numerous folds 
hanging in heavy parallel lines, opposing the lines of 
the peplus, or cloak, which cross it diagonally over the 
breast, enwrapping the upper portion of the body 
somewhat closely. It is the very type of the wander- 
ing woman, going grandly, indeed, as Homer describes 
her, yet so human in her anguish, that we seem to 
recognise some far descended shadow of her, in the 
homely figure of the roughly clad French peasant 
woman, who, in one of Corot's pictures, is hasting 
along under a sad light, as the day goes out behind 
the little hill. We have watched the growth of the 
merely personal sentiment in the story ; and we may 
notice that, if this figure be indeed Demeter, then the 
conception of her has become wholly humanised ; no 
trace of the primitive cosmical import of the myth, 
no colour or scent of the mystical earth, remains 
about it. 

The seated figure, much mutilated, and worn by 
long exposure, yet possessing, according to the best 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 151 

critics, marks of the school of Praxiteles, is almost 
undoubtedly the image of Demeter enthroned. Three 
times in the Homeric hymn she is represented as sit- 
ting, once by the fountain at the wayside, again in the 
house of Celeus, and again in the newly finished 
temple of Eleusis ; but always in sorrow ; seated on 
the TTcVpa dyeAao-ro?, which, as Ovid told us, the peo- 
ple of Attica still called the stone of sorrow. Here 
she is represented in her later state of reconciliation, 
enthroned as the glorified mother of all things. The 
dehcate plaiting of the tunic about the throat, the 
formal curling of the hair, and a certain weight of over- 
thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of 
Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose charac- 
teristics is a very sensitive expression of the sentiment 
of maternity. It reminds one especially of a work by 
one of his scholars, the Virgin of the Balances, in the 
Louvre, a picture which has been thought to repre- 
sent, under a veil, the blessing of universal nature, and 
in which the sleepy-looking heads, with a peculiar 
grace and refinement of somewhat advanced life in 
them, have just this half-weary posture. We see here, 
then, the Here of the world below, the Stygian Juno, 
the chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowd- 
ing, in the poem of Claudian, to the marriage toilet of 
Proserpine, the goddess of the fertility of the earth 



152 THE MYTH OF 

and of all creatures, but still of fertility as arisen out 
of death ; ^ and therefore she is not without a certain 
pensiveness, having seen the seed fall into the ground 
and die, many times. Persephone is returned to her, 
and the hair spreads, like a rich harvest, over her 
shoulders ; but she is still veiled, and knows that the 
seed must fall into the ground again, and Persephone 
descend again from her. 

The statues of the supposed priestess, and of the 
enthroned Demeter, are of more than the size of Hfe ; 
the figure of Persephone is but seventeen inches high, 
a daintily handled toy of Parian marble, the miniature 
copy perhaps of a much larger work, which might 
well be reproduced on a magnified scale. The con- 
ception of Demeter is throughout chiefly human, and 
even domestic, though never without a hieratic inter- 
est, because she is not a goddess only, but also a 
priestess. In contrast, Persephone is wholly un- 
earthly, the close companion, and even the confused 
double, of Hecate, the goddess of midnight terrors, — 
Despcena^ — the final mistress of all that lives ; and 
as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter, 
so awe of Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and 
death, and flowers, but of narcotic flowers especially, 

1 " Pallere ligustra, 
Exspirare rosas, decrescere lilia vidi." 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 153 

— a revenant, who in the garden of Aidoneus has 
eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the 
secret of decay in her, of return to the grave, in 
the mystery of those swallowed seeds ; sometimes, 
in later work, holding in her hand the key of the 
great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also ; 
(there, finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams ;) 
sometimes, like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep 
and death by its narcotic juices, of life and resurrec- 
tion by its innumerable seeds, of the dreams, there- 
fore, that may intervene between falHng asleep and 
waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and 
still more in this statue, the image of Persephone may 
be regarded as the result of many efforts to lift the 
old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in heavier 
souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impres- 
sions of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness 
even ; it is meant to make men in love, or at least at 
peace, with death. The Persephone of Praxiteles' 
school, then, is Aphrodite- Persephone^ Venus- Libitina, 
Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colour- 
ing of the under-world, and the tranquillity, born of it, 
has '^passed into her face '' ; for the Greek Hades is, 
after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not very different 
from that House of Fame where Dante places the great 
souls of the classical world ; Aidoneus himself being 



154 THE MYTH OF 

conceived, in the highest Greek sculpture, as but a 
gentler Zeus, the great innkeeper ; so that when a cer- 
tain Greek sculptor had failed in his portraiture of 
Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little, in 
the eyes and brow, of the open and cheerful sky, he 
only changed its title, and the thing passed excel- 
lently, with its heavy locks and shadowy eyebrows, for 
the god of the dead. The image of Persephone, then, 
as it is here composed, with the tall, tower-like head- 
dress, from which the veil depends — the corn-basket, 
originally carried thus by the Greek women, balanced 
on the head — giving the figure unusual length, has 
the air of a body bound about with grave-clothes ; 
while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiff- 
ness in the folds of the drapery, give it something of 
a hieratic character, and to the modern observer may 
suggest a sort of kinship with the more chastened kind 
of Gothic work. But quite of the school of Praxiteles 
is the general character of the composition ; the 
graceful waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the 
Httle face, of the eyes and lips especially, like 
the shadows of a flower — a flower risen noiselessly 
from its dwelling in the dust — though still with that 
fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people, 
which, in the delicate gradations of Greek sculpture, 
distinguish the infernal deities from their Olympian 



DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 155 

kindred. The object placed in the hand may be, 
perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower, but is probably the 
partly consumed pomegranate — one morsel gone ; 
the most usual emblem of Persephone being this 
mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude of its 
seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity, and 
was sold at the doors of the temple of Ceres, that the 
women might offer it there, and bear numerous chil- 
dren ; and so, to the middle age, became a symbol of 
the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed 
sown in the dark under-world ; and at last of that 
whole hidden region, so thickly sown, which Dante 
visited, Michelino painting him, in the Duomo of 
Florence, with this fruit in his hand, and BotticelU 
putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men 
"go down into hell, is there also." 

There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the 
earth, akin to the influence of cool places, quiet houses, 
subdued light, tranquillising voices. What is there in 
this phase of ancient rehgion for us, at the present 
day? The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, 
illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion 
of pure ideas — of conceptions, which having no link 
on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out 
of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate sym- 
bols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions 



156 THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 

of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold 
through many changes, and are still not without a sol- 
emnising power even for the modern mind, which has 
once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabi- 
tants ; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying 
of our sentiments, long after the earher and simpler 
races of their worshippers have passed away, they may 
be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once 
legitimate and possible, of the associations, the con- 
ceptions, the imagery, of Greek rehgious poetry in 
general, of the poetry of all rehgions. 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 



A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES 

Centuries of zealous archaeology notwithstanding, 
many phases of the so varied Greek genius are recorded 
for the modern student in a kind of shorthand only, 
or not at all. Even for Pausanias, visiting Greece 
before its direct part in affairs was quite played out, 
much had perished or grown dim — of its art, of the 
truth of its outward history, above all of its religion 
as a credible or practicable thing. And yet Pausanias 
visits Greece under conditions as favourable for obser- 
vation as those under which later travellers, Addison 
or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him the impress 
of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and 
entire than that of medieval Italy to ourselves ; at 
Siena, for instance, with its ancient palaces still in 
occupation, its pubHc edifices as serviceable as if the 
old repubhc had but just now vacated them, the tra- 

157 



158 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

dition of their primitive worship still unbroken in its 
churches. Had the opportunities in which Pausanias 
was fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the 
antique Greek life unnoticed by him we should have 
peeped into, minutely systematic in our painstaking ! 
how many a view would broaden out where he notes 
hardly anything at all on his map of Greece ! 

One of the most curious phases of Greek civiHsation 
which has thus perished for us, and regarding which, 
as we may fancy, we should have made better use of 
that old traveller's facihties, is the early Attic deme- 
life — its picturesque, intensely localised variety, in the 
hollow or on the spur of mountain or sea-shore ; and 
with it many a relic of primitive religion, many an early 
growth of art parallel to what Vasari records of artis- 
tic beginnings in the smaller cities of Italy. Colonus 
and Acharnae, surviving still so vividly by the magic 
of Sophocles, of Aristophanes, are but isolated exam- 
ples of a wide-spread manner of Hfe, in which, amid 
many provincial peculiarities, the first, yet perhaps 
the most costly and teUing steps were made in all the 
various departments of Greek culture. Even in the 
days of Pausanias, Piraeus was still traceable as a dis- 
tinct township, once the possible rival of Athens, with 
its little old covered market by the seaside, and the 
symbolical picture of the place, its Genius, visible on 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 159 

the wall. And that is but the type of what there had 
been to know of threescore and more village commu- 
nities, each having its own altars, its special worship 
and place of civic assembly, its trade and crafts, its 
name drawn from physical peculiarity or famous inci- 
dent^ its body of heroic tradition. Lingering on while 
Athens, the great deme, gradually absorbed into itself 
more and more of their achievements, and passing 
away almost completely as political factors in the 
Peloponnesian war, they were still felt, we can hardly 
doubt, in the actual physiognomy of Greece. That 
variety in unity, which its singular geographical forma- 
tion secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost 
in these minute reflexions of the national character, 
with all the relish of local difference — new art, new 
poetry, fresh ventures in political combination, in the 
conception of life, springing as if straight from the 
soil, like the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic 
lines over all that rocky land. On the other hand, it 
was just here that ancient habits clung most tena- 
ciously — that old-fashioned, homely, delightful exist- 
ence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the 
years of the Peloponnesian w^ar, looked back so 
fondly. If the impression of Greece generally is but 
enhanced by the littleness of the physical scene of 
events intellectually so great — such a system of grand 



160 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

* 
lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one 

of its fine coins — ^ still more would this be true of those 
centres of country life. Here, certainly, was that 
assertion of seemingly small interests, which brings 
into free play, and gives his utmost value to, the indi- 
vidual ; making his warfare, equally with his more 
peaceful rivalries, deme against deme, the mountain 
against the plain, the sea-shore, (as in our own old Bor- 
der life, but played out here by wonderfully gifted peo- 
ple) tangible as a personal history, to the doubling of its 
fascination for those whose business is with the survey 
of the dramatic side of Hfe. 

As with civil matters, so it was also, we may fairly 
suppose, with religion ; the deme -life was a manifesta- 
tion of religious custom and sentiment, in all their 
primitive local variety. x\s Athens, gradually drawing 
into itself the various elements of provincial culture, 
developed, with authority, the central religious posi- 
tion, the demes-men did but add the worship of 
Athene Polias, the goddess of the capital, to their own 
pre-existent ritual uses. Of local and central religion 
alike, ^ time and circumstance had obliterated much 
when Pausanias came. A devout spirit, with religion 
for his chief interest, eager for the trace of a divine 
footstep, anxious even in the days of Lucian to deal 
seriously with what had counted for so much to serious 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 161 

men, he has, indeed, to lament that ^' Pan is dead : " — 
"They come no longer!" — ^^ These things happen 
no longer!" But the Greek — his very name also, 
Hellen, was the title of a priesthood — had been relig- 
ious abundantly, sanctifying every detail of his actual 
life with the religious idea ; and as Pausanias goes on 
his way he finds many a remnant of that earlier estate 
of religion, when, as he fancied, it had been nearer 
the gods, as it was certainly nearer the earth. It is 
marked, even in decay, with varieties of place ; and 
is not only continuous but in situ. At Phigaleia he 
makes his offerings to Demeter, agreeably to the pater- 
nal rites of the inhabitants, wax, fruit, undressed wool 
" still full of the sordes of the sheep." A dream from 
heaven cuts short his notice of the mysteries of Eleusis. 
He sees the stone, " big enough for a Httle man," on 
which Silenus was used to sit and rest ; at Athens, the 
tombs of the x\mazons, of the purple-haired Nisus, of 
Deucalion ; — "it is a manifest token that he had 
dwelt there." The worshippers of Poseidon, even at 
his temple among the hills, might still feel the earth 
fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for divine 
things, he tells us, the Athenians outdid all other 
Greeks. Even in the days of Nero it revealed itself 
oddly ; and it is natural to suppose that of this temper 
the demes, as the proper home of conservatism, were 

M 



162 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

exceptionally expressive. Scattered in those remote, 
romantic villages, among their olives or sea-weeds, lay 
the heroic graves, the relics, the sacred images, often 
rude enough amid the delicate tribute of later art; 
this too oftentimes finding in such retirement its best 
inspirations, as in some Attic Fiesole. Like a network 
over the land of gracious poetic tradition, as also of 
undisturbed ceremonial usage surviving late for those 
who cared to seek it, the local religions had been never 
wholly superseded by the worship of the great national 
temples. They were, in truth, the most character- 
istic developments of a faith essentially earth-born 
or indigenous. 

And how often must the student of fine art, again, 
wish he had the same sort of knowledge about its 
earher growth in Greece, that he actually possesses in 
the case of Italian art ! Given any development at 
all in this matter, there must have been phases of art, 
which, if immature, were also veritable expressions of 
power to come, intermediate discoveries of beauty, 
such as are by no means a mere anticipation, and of 
service only as explaining historically larger subse- 
quent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness 
in themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of 
certain amiable artistic qualities. And in regard to 
Greek art at its best — the Parthenon — no less than 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 163 

to the art of the Renaissance at its best — the Sistine 
Chapel — the more instructive Hght would be derived 
rather from what precedes than what follows such 
central success, from the determination to apprehend 
the fulfilment of past effort rather than the eve of de- 
chne, in the critical, central moment which partakes 
of both. Of such early promise, early achievement, 
we have in the case of Greek art Httle to compare with 
what is extant of the youth of the arts in Italy. Over- 
beck's careful gleanings of its history form indeed a 
sorry relic as contrasted with Vasari's intimations of 
the beginnings of the Renaissance. Fired by certain 
fragments of its earlier days, of a beauty, in truth, 
absolute, and vainly longing for more, the student of 
Greek sculpture indulges the thought of an ideal of 
youthful energy therein, yet withal of youthful self- 
restraint ; and again, as with survivals of old rehgion, 
the privileged home, he fancies, of that ideal must 
have been in those venerable Attic townships, as to 
a large extent it passed away with them. 

The budding of new art, the survival of old rehgion, 
at isolated centres of provincial life, where varieties 
of human character also were keen, abundant, asserted 
in correspondingly effective incident — this is what 
irresistible fancy superinduces on historic details, 
themselves meagre enough. The sentiment of antiq- 



164 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

uity is indeed a characteristic of all cultivated peo- 
ple, even in what may seem the freshest ages, and not 
exclusively a humour of our later world. In the 
earliest notices about them, as we know, the people 
of Attica appear already impressed by the immense 
antiquity of their occupation of its soil, of which they 
claim to be the very first flower. Some at least of 
those old demes-men we may well fancy sentimentally 
reluctant to change their habits, fearful of losing too 
much of themselves in the larger stream of hfe, chng- 
ing to what is antiquated as the work of centralisation 
goes on, needful as that work was, v/ith the great 
" Eastern difficulty " already ever in the distance. 
The fear of Asia, barbaric, splendid, hardly known, 
yet haunting the curious imagination of those who had 
borrowed thence the art in which they were rapidly 
excelling it, developing, as we now see, in the interest 
of Greek humanity, crafts begotten of tyrannic and 
illiberal luxury, was finally to suppress the rivalries of 
those primitive centres of activity, when the '^ invin- 
cible armada " of the common foe came into sight. 

At a later period civil strife was to destroy their last 
traces. The old hoplite, from Rhamnus or Acharnae, 
pent up in beleaguered Athens during that first summer 
of the Peloponnesian war, occupying with his house- 
hold a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes — 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 165 

one. of many picturesque touches in that severe histo- 
rian — could well remember the ancient provincial life 
which this conflict with Sparta was bringing to an end. 
He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity con- 
cerning those Persian ships, coming first as merchant- 
men, or with pirates on occasion, in the half-savage, 
wicked splendours of their decoration, the monstrous 
figure-heads, their glittering freightage. Men would 
hardly have trusted their women or children with that 
suspicious crew, hovering through the dusk. There 
were soothsayers, indeed, who had long foretold what 
happened soon after, giving shape to vague, super- 
natural terrors. And then he had crept from his hid- 
ing-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain 
at Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, this new 
war with whom seemed to be reviving the fierce local 
feuds of his younger days. Pai'aloi and Diacrioi had 
ever been rivals. Very distant it all seemed now, with 
all the stories he could tell ; for in those crumbling 
Httle towns, as heroic life had lingered on into the 
actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural into the 
heroic. Like mist at dawn, the last traces of its divine 
visitors had then vanished from the land, where, how- 
ever, they had already begotten ^' our best and oldest 
families." 

It was Theseus, uncompromising young master of 



166 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

the situation, in fearless application of " the modern 
spirit " of his day to every phase of life where it was 
applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had given 
Athens a people, reluctant enough, in truth, as Plutarch 
suggests, to desert ^^ their homes and religious usages 
and many good and gracious kings of their own" for 
this elect youth, who thus figures, passably, as a kind 
of mythic shorthand for civiHsation, making roads and 
the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various forms 
of violence, but many innocent things as well. So 
it must needs be in a w^orld where, even hand in hand 
with a god-assisted hero. Justice goes blindfold. He 
slays the bull of Marathon and many another local 
tyrant, but also exterminates that delightful creature, 
the Centaur. The iVmazon, whom Plato will reinstate 
as the type of improved womanhood, has no better 
luck than Phsea, the sow-pig of Crommyon, foul old 
landed-proprietress. They exerted, how^ever, the pre- 
rogative of poetic protest, and survive thereby. Cen- 
taur and i\mazon, as we see them in the fine art of 
Greece, represent the regret of Athenians themselves 
for something that could never be brought to life again, 
and have their pathos. Those young heroes contend- 
ing with Amazons on the frieze of the Mausoleum 
had best make haste with their bloody work, if young 
people's eyes can tell a true story. A type still of 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 167 

progress triumphant through injustice, set on improv- 
ing things off the face of the earth, Theseus took 
occasion to attack the Amazons in their mountain 
home, not long after their ruinous conflict with Her- 
cules, and hit them when they were down. That 
greater bully had laboured off on the world's highway, 
carrying with him the official girdle of Antiope, their 
queen, gift of Ares, and therewith, it would seem, 
the mystic secret of their strength. At sight of this 
new foe, at any rate, she came to a strange submission. 
The savage virgin had turned to very woman, and 
was presently a willing slave, returning on the gaily 
appointed ship in all haste to Athens, where in sup- 
posed wedlock she bore King Theseus a son. 

With their annual visit — visit to the Gargareans ! — 
for the purpose of maintaining their species, parting 
with their boys early, these husbandless women could 
hardly be supposed a very happy, certainly not a very 
joyous people. They figure rather as a sorry measure 
of the luck of the female sex in taking a hard natural 
law into their own hands, and by abnegation of all 
tender companionship making shift with bare inde- 
pendence, as a kind of second-best — the best practi- 
cable by them in the imperfect actual condition of 
things. But the heart-strings would ache still where 
the breast had been cut away. The sisters of Antiope 



168 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

had come, not immediately, but in careful array of 
battle, to bring back the captive. x\ll along the 
weary roads from the Caucasus to Attica, their 
traces had remained in the great graves of those 
who died by the way. Against the httle remnant, 
carrying on the fight to the very midst of Athens, 
Antiope herself had turned, all other thoughts trans- 
formed now into wild idolatry of her hero. Super- 
stitious, or in real regret, the i\thenians never forgot 
their tombs. As for Antiope, the consciousness of her 
perfidy remained with her, adding the pang of remorse 
to her own desertion, when King Theseus, with his 
accustomed bad faith to women, set her, too, aside in 
turn. Phaedra, the true wife, was there, peeping sus- 
piciously at her rival ; and even as Antiope yielded 
to her lord's embraces the thought had come that a 
male child might be the instrument of her anger, and 
one day judge her cause. 

In one of these doomed, decaying villages, then, 
King Theseus placed the woman and her babe, 
hidden, yet secure, within the Attic border, as men 
veil their mistakes or crimes. They might pass away, 
they and their story, together with the memory of 
other antiquated creatures of such places, who had 
had connubial dealings with the stars. The white, 
paved waggon-track, a by-path of the sacred way to 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 169 

Eleusis, zigzagged through slopmg oUve-yards, from 
the plain of silvered blue, with Athens building in the 
distance, and passed the door of the rude stone house, 
furnished scantily, which no one had ventured to 
inhabit of late years till they came there. On the 
ledges of the grey cliffs above, the laurel groves, stem 
and foliage of motionless bronze, had spread their 
tents. Travellers bound northwards were glad to 
repose themselves there, and take directions, or pro- 
vision for their journey onwards, from the highland 
people, who came down hither to sell their honey, 
their cheese, and woollen stuff, in the tiny market- 
place. At dawn the great stars seemed to halt a 
while, burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity, 
on those distant, obscurely named heights, like 
broken swords, the rim of the world. A little later 
you could just see the newly opened quarries, like 
streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms. 
Thither in spring-time all eyes turned from Athens 
devoutly, intent till the first shaft of lightning gave 
signal for the departure of the sacred ship to Delos. 
Racing over those rocky surfaces, the virgin air de- 
scended hither with the secret of profound sleep, as 
the child lay in its cubicle hewn in the stone, the 
white fleeces heaped warmly round him. In the wild 
Amazon's soul, to her surprise, and at first against 



170 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

her will, the maternal sense had quickened from the 
moment of his conception, and, (that burst of angry- 
tears with which she had received him into the world 
once dried up) kindling more eagerly at every token 
of manly growth, had at length driven out every other 
feeling. And this animal sentiment, educating the 
human hand and heart in her, had become a moral 
one, when, King Theseus leaving her in anger, visibly 
unkind, the child had crept to her side, and tracing 
with small fingers the wrinkled lines of her woe-begone 
brow, carved there as if by a thousand years of sorrow, 
had sown between himself and her the seed of an un- 
dying sympathy. 

She was thus already on the watch for a host of 
minute recognitions on his part, of the self-sacrifice 
involved in her devotion to a career of which she must 
needs drain out the sorrow, careful that he might taste 
only the joy. So far, amid their spare living, the child, 
as if looking up to the warm broad wing of her love 
above him, seemed replete with comfort. Yet in his 
moments of childish sickness, the first passing shadows 
upon the deep joy of her motherhood, she teaches him 
betimes to soothe or cheat pain' — little bodily pains 
only, hitherto. She ventures sadly to assure him of 
the harsh necessities of Hfe : " Courage, child ! Every 
one must take his share of suffering. Shift not thy 



HIPPOLVTUS VEILED 171 

body so vehemently. Pain, taken quietly, is easier 
to bear." 

Carefully inverting the habits of her own rude 
childhood, she learned to spin the wools, white and 
grey, to clothe and cover him pleasantly. The spec- 
tacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at present 
a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange 
sense of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watch- 
ing, as her own long-deferred recreation in life, his 
delight in the little delicacies she prepared to his 
liking — broiled kids' flesh, the red wine, the mush- 
rooms sought through the early dew — his hunger and 
thirst so daintily satisfied, as he sat at table, like the 
first-born of King Theseus, with two wax-lights and 
a fire at dawn or nightfall dancing to the prattle and 
laughter, a bright child, never stupidly weary. At 
times his very happiness would seem to her like a 
menace of misfortune to come. Was there not with 
herself the curse of that unsisterly action? and not 
far from him, the terrible danger of the father's, the 
step-mother's jealousy, the mockery of those half- 
brothers to come ? Ah ! how perilous for happiness 
the sensibilities which make him so exquisitely happy 
now ! Before they started on their dreadful visit to 
the Minotaur, says Plutarch, the women told their 
sons many tales and other things to encourage them ; 



172 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

and, even as she had furnished the child betimes with 
rules for the solace of bodily pain, so now she would 
have brought her own sad experience into service in 
precepts fqi" the ejection of its festering power out of 
any other trouble that might visit him. Already those 
little disappointments which are as the shadow beside 
all conscious enjoyment, were no petty things ta her, 
but had for her their pathos, as children's troubles will 
have, in spite of the longer chance before them. They 
were as the first steps in a long story of deferred hopes, 
or anticipations of death itself and the end of them. 

The gift of Ares gone, the mystic girdle she would 
fain have transferred to the child, that bloody god of 
storm and battle, hereditary patron of her house, 
faded from her thoughts together with the memory of 
her past life — the more completely, because another 
familiar though somewhat forbidding deity, accepting 
certainly a cruel and forbidding worship, was already 
in possession, and reigning in the new home when she 
came thither. Only, thanks to some kindly local 
influence, (by grace, say, of its delicate air) Artemis, 
this other god she had known in the Scythian wilds, 
had put aside her fierce ways, as she paused awhile 
on her heavenly course among these ancient abodes of 
men, gliding softty, mainly through their dreams, with 
abundance of salutary touches. Full, in truth, of 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 173 

grateful memory of some timely service at human 
hands ! In these highland villages the tradition of 
celestial visitants clung fondly, of god or hero, belated 
or misled on long journeys, yet pleased to be among 
the sons of men, as their way led them up the steep, 
narrow, crooked street, condescending to rest a little, 
as one, under some sudden stress not clearly ascer- 
tained, had done here, in this very house, thereafter 
for ever sacred. The place and its inhabitants, of 
course, had been something bigger in the days of 
those old mythic hospitahties, unless, indeed, divine 
persons took kindly the will for the deed — very 
different, surely, from the present condition of things, 
for there was Httle here to detain a dehcate traveller, 
even in the abode of Antiope and her son, though it 
had been the residence of a king. 

Hard by stood the chapel of the goddess, who had 
thus adorned the place with her memories. The 
priests, indeed, were already departed to Athens, 
carrying with them the ancient image, the vehicle 
of her actual presence, as the surest means of en- 
riching the capital at the expense of the country, 
where she must now make poor shift of the occa- 
sional worshipper on his way through these mountain 
passes. But safely roofed beneath the sturdy tiles of 
grey Hymettus marble, upon the walls of the little 



174 HIPPOLYTtJS VEILED 

square recess enclosing the deserted pedestal, a series 
of crowded imageries, in the devout spirit of earlier 
days, were eloquent concerning her. Here from scene 
to scene, touched with silver among the wild and 
human creatures in dun bronze, with the moon's disk 
around her head, shrouded closely, the goddess of the 
chase still glided mystically through all the varied 
incidents of her story, in all the detail of a written 
book. 

A book for the delighted reading of a scholar, will- 
ing to ponder at leisure, to make his w^ay surely, and 
understand. Very different, certainly, from the cruel- 
featured little idol his mother had brought in her bun- 
dle — the old Scythian Artemis, hanging there on the 
wall, side by side with the forgotten Ares, blood-red, — 
the goddess reveals herself to the lad, poring through 
the dusk by taper-light, as at once a virgin, necessa- 
rily therefore the creature of solitude, yet also as 
the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness of the 
young. Her friendly intervention at the act of birth 
everywhere, her claim upon the nursHng, among tame 
and wild creatures equally, among men as among gods, 
nay ! among the stars (upon the very star of dawn), 
gave her a breadth of influence seemingly co-extensive 
with the sum of things. Yes I his great mother was 
in touch with everything. Yet throughout he can but 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 175 

note her perpetual chastity, with pleasurable though 
half-suspicious wonder at the mystery, he knows not 
what, involved therein, as though he awoke suddenly 
in some distant, unexplored region of her person and 
activity. Why the lighted torch always, and that long 
straight vesture rolled round so formally? Was it only 
against the cold of these northern heights ? 

To her, nevertheless, her maternity, her solitude, 
to this virgin mother, who, with no husband, no lover, 
no fruit of her own, is so tender to the children of 
others, in a full heart he devotes himself — his im- 
maculate body and soul. Dedicating himself thus, he 
has the sense also that he becomes more entirely than 
ever the chevalier of his mortal mother, of her sad 
cause. The devout, diligent hands clear away care- 
fully the dust, the faded relics of her former worship ; 
a worship renewed once more as the sacred spring, 
set free from encumbrance, in answer to his willing 
ministries murmurs again under the dim vault in its 
marble basin, work of primitive Titanic fingers — flows 
out through its rocky channel, filling the whole town- 
ship with chaste thoughts of her. 

Through much labour at length he comes to the 
veritable story of her birth, like a gift direct from the 
goddess herself to this loyal soul. There were those 
in later times who, like ^schylus, knew Artemis as 



176 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

the daughter not of Leto but of Demeter, according 
to the version of her history now conveyed to the 
young Hippolytus, together with some deepened 
insight into her character. The goddess of Eleusis, 
on a journey, in the old days when, as Plato says, 
men lived nearer the gods, finding herself with child 
by some starry inmate of those high places, had lain 
down in the rock-hewn cubicle of the inner chamber, 
and, certainly in sorrow, brought forth a daughter. 
Here was the secret at once of the genial, all-embrac- 
ing maternity of this new strange Artemis, and of 
those more dubious tokens, the lighted torch, the 
winding-sheet, the arrow of death on the string — of 
sudden death, truly, which may be thought after all 
the kindest, as prevenient of all disgraceful sickness 
or waste in the unsulHed limbs. For the late birth 
into the world of this so shadowy daughter was some- 
how identified with the sudden passing into Hades 
of her first-born, Persephone. As he scans those 
scenes anew, an awful surmise comes to him ; his 
divine patroness moves there as death, surely. Still, 
however, gratefully putting away suspicion, he seized 
even in these ambiguous imageries their happier sug- 
gestions, satisfied in thinking of his new mother as but 
the giver of sound sleep, of the benign night, whence 
— mystery of mysteries ! — good things are born 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 177 

softly, from which he awakes bedmes for his healthful 
service to her. Either way, sister of Apollo or sister 
of Persephone, to him she should be a power of sanity, 
sweet as the flowers he offered her gathered at dawn, 
setting daily their purple and white frost against her 
ancient marbles. There was more certainly than the 
first breath of day in them. Was there here some- 
thing of her person, her sensible pre*sence, by way of 
direct response to him in his early devotion, astir for 
her sake before the very birds, nesting here so freely, 
the quail above all, in some privileged connexion with 
her story still unfathomed by the learned youth? 
Amid them he too found a voice, and sang articulately 
the praises of the great goddess. 

Those more dubious traits, nevertheless, so lightly 
disposed of by Hippolytus, (Hecate thus counting for 
him as Artemis goddess of health,) became to his 
mother, in the light of her sad experience, the sum of 
the whole matter. While he drew only peaceful 
inducements to sleep from that two-sided figure, she 
reads there a volume of sinister intentions, and liked 
little this seemingly dead goddess, who could but 
move among the Hving banefully, stealing with her 
night-shade into the day where she had no proper 
right. The gods had ever had much to do with the 
shaping of her fortunes and the fortunes of her kin- 



17S HIPPO LYTUS VEILED 

dred ; and the mortal mother felt nothing less than 
jealousy from the hour when the lad had first de- 
lightedly called her to share his discoveries, and learn 
the true story (if it were not rather the malicious 
counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he 
has thus absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this 
absolute chastity itself a kind of death? She, too, 
in secret makes her gruesome midnight offering with 
averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger ; 
creeps to his cubicle to see ; the face is covered, as he 
lies, against the cold. She traces the motionless out- 
line, raises the coverlet ; with the nice black head 
deep in the fleecy pillow he is sleeping quietly, he 
dreams of that other mother gliding in upon the 
moonbeam, and awaking turns sympathetically upon 
the living woman, is subdued in a moment to the 
expression of her troubled spirit, and understands. 

And when the child departed from her for the first 
time, springing from his white bed before the dawn, 
to accompany the elders on their annual visit to the 
Eleusinian goddess, the after-sense of his wonderful 
happiness, tranquillising her in spite of herself by its 
genial power over the actual moment, stirred neverthe- 
less a new sort of anxiety for the future. Her work 
in life henceforward was defined as a ministry to so 
precious a gift, in full consciousness of its risk ; it 



HIPrOLYTUS VEILED 179 

became her religion, the centre of her pieties. She 
missed painfully his continual singing hovering about 
the place, like the earth itself made audible in all 
its humanities. Half- selfish for a moment, she prays 
that he may remain for ever a child, to her solace ; 
welcomes now the promise of his chastity (though 
chastity were itself a kind of death) as the pledge of 
his abiding always with her. And these thoughts 
were but infixed more deeply by the sudden stroke 
of joy at his return home in ceremonial trim and 
grown more manly, with much increase of self-con- 
fidence in that brief absence among his fellows. 

For, from the first, the unwelcome child, the out- 
cast, had been successful, with that special good 
fortune which sometimes attends the outcast. His 
happiness, his invincible happiness, had been found 
engaging, perhaps by the gods, certainly by men ; 
and when King Theseus came to take note how 
things went in that rough life he had assigned them, 
he felt a half liking for the boy, and bade him come 
down to Athens and see the sights, partly by way of 
proof to his already somewhat exacting wife of the 
difference between the old love and the new as 
measured by the present condition of their respective 
offspring. The fine nature, fastidious by instinct, but 
bred with frugality enough to find the charm of con- 



180 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

tinual surprise in that delicate new Athens, draws, as 
he goes, the full savour of its novelties ; the marbles, 
the space and finish, the busy gaiety of its streets, the 
elegance of life there, contrasting with while it adds 
some mysterious endearment to the thought of his 
own rude home. Without envy, in hope only one 
day to share, to win them by kindness, he gazes 
on the motley garden-plots, the soft bedding, the 
showy toys, the delicate keep of the children of 
Phaedra, who turn curiously to their half-brother, 
venture to touch his long strange gown of homespun 
grey, like the soft coat of some wild creature who 
might let one stroke it. Close to their dainty existence 
for a while, he regards it as from afar ; looks forward 
all day to the lights, the prattle, the laughter, the 
white bread, like sweet cake to him, of their ordinary 
evening meal ; returns again and again, in spite of 
himself, to watch, to admire, feeling a power mthin 
him to merit the like ; finds his way back at last, 
still light of heart, to his own poor fare, able to do 
without what he would enjoy so much. As, grateful 
for his scanty part in things — for the make-believe of 
a feast in the little white loaves she too has managed 
to come by, sipping the thin white wine, he touches 
her dearly, the mother is shocked with a sense of 
something unearthly in his contentment, while he 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 181 

comes and goes, singing now more abundantly than 
ever a new canticle to her divine rival. Were things, 
after all, to go grudgingly with him ? Sensible of that 
curse on herself, with her suspicions of his kinsfolk, of 
this dubious goddess to whom he has devoted him- 
self, she anticipates with more foreboding than ever 
his path to be, with or without a wife — her own soli- 
tude, or his — the painful heats and cold. She fears 
even these late successes ; it were best to veil their 
heads. The strong as such had ever been against her 
and hers. The father came again ; noted the boy's 
growth. Manliest of men, like Hercules in his cloak 
of lion's skin, he has after all but scant liking, feels, 
through a certain meanness of soul, scorn for the finer 
likeness of himself. Might this creature of an already 
vanishing world, who for all his hard rearing had a 
manifest distinction of character, one day become his 
rival, full of loyalty as he was already to the deserted 
mother ? 

To charming Athens, nevertheless, he crept back, 
as occasion served, to gaze peacefully on the delightful 
good fortune of others, waiting for the opportunity to 
take his own turn with the rest, driving down thither 
at last in a chariot gallantly, when all the town was 
assembled to celebrate the king's birthday. For the 
goddess, herself turning ever kinder, and figuring more 



182 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

and more exclusively as the tender nurse of all things, 
had transformed her young votary from a hunter into 
a charioteer, a rearer and driver of horses, after the 
fashion of his Amazon mothers before him. There- 
upon, all the lad's wholesome vanity had centred on 
the fancy of the world-famous games then lately es- 
tablished, as, smihng down his mother's terrors^ and 
grateful to his celestial mother for many a hair- 
breadth escape, he practised day by day, fed the 
animals, drove them out, amused though companion- 
less, visited them affectionately in the deserted stone 
stables of the ancient king. A chariot and horses, as 
being the showiest outward thing the world afforded, 
was like the pawn he moved to represent the big 
demand he meant to make, honestly, generously, on 
the ample fortunes of life. There was something of 
his old miraculous kindred, alien from this busy new 
world he came to, about the boyish driver with the 
fame of a scholar, in his grey fleecy cloak and hood 
of soft white woollen stuff, as he drove in that morning. 
Men seemed to have seen a star flashing, and crowded 
round to examine the little mountain-bred beasts, in 
loud, friendly intercourse with the hero of the hour — 
even those usually somewhat unsympathetic half-broth- 
ers now full of enthusiasm for the outcast and his good 
fight for prosperity. Instinctively people admired his 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 183 

wonderful placidity, and would fain have shared its 
secret, as it were the carelessness of some fair flower 
upon his face. A victor in the day's race, he carried 
home as his prize a glittering new harness in place of 
the very old one he had come with. " My chariot and 
horses ! " he says now, with his single touch of pride. 
Yet at home, savouring to the full his old solitary 
happiness, veiled again from time to time in that 
ancient Hfe, he is still the student, still ponders the old 
writings which tell of his divine patroness. At Athens 
strange stories are told in turn of him, his nights upon 
the mountains, his dreamy sin, with that hypocritical 
virgin goddess, stories which set the jealous suspicions 
of Theseus at rest once more. For so *^ dream " not 
those who have the tangible, appraiseable world in view. 
Even Queen Phaedra looks with pleasure, as he comes, 
on the once despised illegitimate creature, at home 
now here too, singing always audaciously, so visibly 
happy, occupied, popular. 

Encompassed by the luxuries of Athens, far from 
those peaceful mountain places, among people further 
still in spirit from their peaceful light and shade, he 
did not forget the kindly goddess, still sharing with 
his earthly mother the prizes, or what they would buy, 
for the adornment of their spare abode. The tombs 
of the fallen Amazons, the spot where they had 



184 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

breathed their last, he piously visited, informed him- 
self of every circumstance of the event with devout 
care, and, thinking on them amid the dainties of the 
royal table, boldly brought them too their share of 
the offerings to the heroic dead. Aphrodite, indeed — 
Aphrodite, of whom he had scarcely so much as 
heard — was just then the best-served deity in Athens, 
with all its new wealth of colour and form, its gold 
and ivory, the acting, the music, the fantastic women, 
beneath the shadow of the great walls still rising 
steadily. Hippolytus would have no part in her 
worship ; instead did what was in him to revive the 
neglected service of his own goddess, stirring an old 
jealousy. For Aphrodite too had looked with delight 
upon the youth, already the centre of a -hundred less 
dangerous human rivalries among the maidens of 
Greece, and was by no means indifferent to his indif- 
ference, his instinctive distaste ; while the sterner, 
almost forgotten Artemis found once more her great 
moon-shaped cake, set about with starry tapers, at 
the appointed seasons. 

They know him now from afar, by his emphatic, 
shooting, arrowy movements ; and on the day of the 
great chariot races ^^ he goes in and wins." To the 
surprise of all he compounded his handsome prize for 
the old wooden image taken from the chapel at home, 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 185 

lurking now in an obscure shrine in the meanest quar- 
ter of the town. Sober amid the noisy feasting which 
followed, unashamed, but travelling by night to hide 
it from their mockery, warm at his bosom, he reached 
the passes at twilight, and through the deep peace of 
the glens bore it to the old resting-place, now more 
worthy than ever of the presence of its mistress, his 
mother and all the people of the village coming forth 
to salute her, all doors set mystically open, as she 
advances. 

Phaedra too, his step-mother, a fiery soul with wild, 
strange blood in her veins, forgetting her fears of this 
illegitimate rival of her children, seemed now to have 
seen him for the first time, loved at last the very touch 
of his fleecy cloak, and would fain have had him of 
her own religion. i\s though the once neglected 
child had been another, she tries to win him as a 
stranger in his manly perfection, growing more than 
an affectionate mother to her husband's son. But 
why thus intimate and congenial, she asks, always in 
the wrong quarter? Why not compass two ends at 
once? Why so squeamishly neglect the powerful, 
any power at all, in a city so full of religion? He 
might find the image of her sprightly goddess every- 
where, to his liking, gold, silver, native or stranger, 
new or old, graceful, or indeed, if he preferred it so, 



186 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

in iron or stone. By the way, she explains the deUghts 
of love, of marriage, the husband once out of the 
way ; finds in him, with misgiving, a sort of forward- 
ness, as she thinks, on this one matter, as if he under- 
stood her craft and despised it. He met her questions 
in truth with scarce so much as contempt, with laugh- 
ing counter-queries, why people needed wedding at 
all? They might hdiVQ found the children in the tem- 
ples, or bought them, as you could buy flowers in 
Athens. 

Meantime Phaedra's young children draw from the 
seemingly unconscious finger the marriage-ring, set it 
spinning on the floor at his feet, and the staid youth 
places it for a moment on his own finger for safety. 
As it settles there, his step-mother, aware all the 
while, suddenly presses his hand over it. He found 
the ring there that night as he lay ; left his bed in 
the darkness, and again, for safety, put it on the finger 
of the image, wedding once for all that so kindly mys- 
tical mother. And still, even amid his earthly mother's 
terrible misgivings, he seems to foresee a charming 
career marked out before him in friendly Athens, to 
the height of his desire. Grateful that he is here at 
all, sharing at last so freely life's banquet, he puts him- 
self for a moment in his old place, recalling his old 
enjoyment of the pleasure of others ; feels, just then. 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 187 

no different. Yet never had life seemed so sufficing 
as at this moment — the meat, the drink, the drives, 
the popularity as he comes and goes, even his step- 
mother's false, selfish, ostentatious gifts. But she, too, 
begins to feel something of the jealousy of that other 
divine, would-be mistress, and by way of a last effort 
to bring him to a better mind in regard to them both, 
conducts hrm (immeasurable privilege !) to her own 
private chapel. 

You could hardly tell where the apartments of the 
adulteress ended and that of the divine courtesan 
began. Haunts of her long, indolent, self-pleasing 
nights and days, they presented everywhere the im- 
press of Phaedra's luxurious humour. A peculiar glow, 
such as he had never before seen, like heady lamp- 
light, or sunshine to some sleeper in a delirious dream, 
hung upon, clung to, the bold, naked, shameful image- 
ries, as his step -mother trimmed the lamps, drew forth 
her sickly perfumes, clad afresh in piquant change of 
raiment the almost formless goddess crouching there 
in her unclean shrine or stye, set at last her foolish 
wheel in motion to a low chant, holding him by the 
wrist, keeping close all the while, as if to catch some 
germ of consent in his indifferent words. 

And little by little he perceives that all this is for 
him — the incense, the dizzy wheel, the shreds of stuff 



188 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

cut secretly from his sleeve, the sweetened cup he 
drank at her offer, unavaiHngly ; and yes ! his own 
features surely, in paUid wax. With a gasp of flighty 
laughter she ventures to point the thing out to him, 
full as he is at last of visible, irrepressible dislike. Ah ! 
it was that very reluctance that chiefly stirred her. 
Healthily white and red, he had a marvellous air of 
discretion about him, as of one never to" be caught 
unaware, as if he never could be anything but like 
water from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morn- 
ing, or the beams of the morning star turned to human 
flesh. It was the self-possession of this happy mind, 
the purity of this virgin body, she would fain have per- 
turbed, as a pledge to herself of her own gaudy claim 
to supremacy. King Theseus, as she knew, had had 
at least two earlier loves ; for once she would be a first 
love ; felt at moments that with this one passion once 
indulged, it might be happiness thereafter to remain 
chaste for ever. And then, by accident, yet surely 
reading indifference in his manner of accepting her 
gifts, she is ready again for contemptuous, open battle. 
Is he indeed but a child still, this nursling of the for- 
bidding Amazon, of that Amazonian goddess — to be 
a child always? or a wily priest rather, skilfully cir- 
cumventing her sorceries, with mystic precautions of 
his own? In truth, there is something of the priestly 



I 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 189 

character in this impassible discretion, reminding her 
of his alleged intimacy with the rival goddess, and 
redoubling her curiosity, her fondness. Phaedra, love- 
sick, feverish, in bodily sickness at last, raves of the 
cool woods, the chase, the steeds of Hippolytus, her 
thoughts running madly on what she fancies to be his 
secret business ; with a storm of abject tears, foresee- 
ing in one moment of recoil the weary tale of years to 
come, star-stricken as she declares, she dared at last 
to confess her longing to already half-suspicious attend- 
ants ; and, awake one morning to find Hippolytus 
there kindly at her bidding, drove him openly forth 
in a tempest of insulting speech. There was a mor- 
dent there, like the menace of misfortune to come, in 
which the injured goddess also was invited to concur. 
What words ! what terrible words ! following, clinging 
to him, like acrid fire upon his bare flesh, as he hasted 
from Phaedra's house, thrust out at last, his vesture 
remaining in her hands. The husband returning sud- 
denly, she tells him a false story of violence to her 
bed, and is believed. 

King Theseus, all his accumulated store of suspi- 
cion and dislike turning now to active hatred, flung 
away readily upon him, bewildered, unheard, one of 
three precious curses (some mystery of wasting sick- 
ness therein) with which Poseidon had indulged him. 



190 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

It seemed sad that one so young must call for justice, 
precariously, upon the gods, the dead, the very walls ! 
Admiring youth dared hardly bid farewell to their late 
comrade ; are generous, at most, in stolen, sympa- 
thetic glances towards the fallen star. At home, veiled 
once again in that ancient twilight world, his mother, 
fearing solely for what he may suffer by the departure 
of that so brief prosperity, enlarged as it had been, 
even so, by his grateful taking of it, is reassured, 
dehghted, happy once more at the visible proof of 
his happiness, his invincible happiness. Duly he 
returned to Athens, early astir, for the last time, to 
restore the forfeited gifts, drove back his gaily painted 
chariot to leave there behind him, actually enjoying 
the drive, going home on foot poorer than ever. He 
takes again to his former modes of Hfe, a little less to 
the horses, a httle more to the old studies, the strange, 
secret history of his favourite goddess, — wronged 
surely ! somehow, she too, as powerless to help him ; 
till he lay sick at last, battling one morning, unaware 
of his mother's presence, with the feverish creations 
of the brain ; the giddy, foolish wheel, the foolish 
song, of Phaedra's chapel, spinning there with his heart 
bound thereto. '' The curses of my progenitors are 
come upon me I" he cries. '^And yet, why so? guilt- 
less as I am of evil." His wholesome religion seem- 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 191 

ing to turn against him now, the trees, the streams, 
the very rocks, swoon into living creatures, swarming 
around the goddess who has lost her grave quietness. 
He finds solicitation, and recoils, in the wind, in the 
sounds of the rain ; till at length delirium itself finds 
a note of returning health. The feverish wood-ways 
of his fancy open unexpectedly upon wide currents 
of air, lulling him to sleep ; and the conflict ending 
suddenly altogether at its sharpest, he lay in the early 
light motionless among the pillows, his mother stand- 
ing by, as she thought, to see him die. As if for the 
last time, she presses on him the things he had liked 
best in that eating and drinking she had found so 
beautiful. The eyes, the eyelids are big with sorrow ; 
and, as he understands again, making an effort for 
her sake, the healthy light returns into his ; a hand 
seizes hers gratefully, and a slow convalescence be- 
gins, the happiest period in the wild mother's life. 
When he longed for flowers for the goddess, she went 
a toilsome journey to seek them, growing close, after 
long neglect, wholesome and firm on their tall stalks. 
The singing she had longed for so despairingly hovers 
gaily once more within the chapel and around the 
house. 

At the crisis of that strange illness she had sup- 
posed her long forebodings about to be realised at 



192 IIIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

last ; but upon his recovery feared no more, assured 
herself that the curses of the father, the step-mother, 
the concurrent ill-will of that angry goddess, have 
done their utmost ; he will outlive her ; a few years 
hence put her to a rest surely welcome. Her mis- 
givings, arising always out of the actual spectacle of 
his profound happiness, seemed at an end in this 
meek bliss, the more as she observed that it was 
a shade less unconscious than of old. And almost 
suddenly he found the strength, the heart, in him, to 
try his fortune again with the old chariot ; and those 
still unsatisfied curses, in truth, going on either side 
of him like living creatures unseen, legend tells briefly 
how, a competitor for pity with Adonis, and Icarus, 
and Hyacinth, and other doomed creatures of imma- 
ture radiance in all story to come, he set forth joyously 
for the chariot-races, not of Athens, but of Troezen, 
her rival. Once more he wins the prize ; he says 
good-bye to admiring friends anxious to entertain 
him, and by night starts off homewards, as of old, 
like a child, returning quickly through the solitude 
in which he had never lacked company, and was now 
to die. Through all the perils of darkness he had 
guided the chariot safely along the curved shore ; the 
dawn was come, and a little breeze astir, as the grey 
level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, 



HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 193 

when in a moment an earthquake, or Poseidon the 
earth-shaker himself, or angry Aphrodite awake from 
the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface ; a great 
wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the 
Attic shore, and was surging here to the very necks 
of the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying so 
pleasantly with him the caress of the morning air, but 
now, wholly forgetful of their old affectionate habit 
of obedience, dragging their leader headlong over the 
rough pavements. Evening and the dawn might seem 
to have met on that hapless day through which they 
drew him home entangled in the trappings of the 
chariot that had been his ruin, till he lay at length, 
grey and haggard, at the rest he had longed for dimly 
amid the buffeting of those murderous stones, his 
mother watching impassibly, sunk at once into the 
condition she had so long anticipated. 

Later legend breaks a supernatural light over that 
great desolation, and would fain relieve the reader 
by introducing the kindly Asclepius, who presently 
restores the youth to life, not, however, in the old 
form or under famihar conditions. To her, surely, 
counting the wounds, the disfigurements, telling over 
the pains which had shot through that dear head 
now insensible to her touch among the pillows under 
o 



194 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 

the harsh broad dayhght, that would have been no 
more of a solace than if, according to the fancy of 
Ovid, he flourished still, a little deity, but under a new 
name and veiled now in old age, in the haunted grove 
of Aricia, far from his old Attic home, in a land which 
had never seen him as he was. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK 
SCULPTURE 



I. THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 

The extant remains of Greek sculpture, though but 
a fragment of what the Greek sculptors produced, are, 
both in number and in excellence, in their fitness, 
therefore, to represent the whole of which they were 
a part, quite out of proportion to what has come 
down to us of Greek painting, and all those minor 
crafts which, in the Greek workshop, as at all 
periods when the arts have been really vigorous, 
were closely connected with the highest imaginative 
work. Greek painting is represented to us only by 
its distant reflexion on the walls of the buried 
houses of Pompeii, and the designs of subordinate 
though exquisite craftsmen on the vases. Of wrought 
metal, partly through the inherent usefulness of its 
material, tempting ignorant persons into whose hands 
it may fall to re-fashion it, we have comparatively 

195 



196 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

little; while, in consequence of the perishableness 
of their material, nothing remains of the curious 
wood-work, the carved ivory, the embroidery and 
coloured stuffs, on which the Greeks set much store 
— of that whole system of refined artisanship, dif- 
fused,, like a general atmosphere of beauty and rich- 
ness, around the more exalted creations of Greek 
sculpture. What we possess, then, of that highest 
Greek sculpture is presented to us in a sort of three- 
fold isolation; isolation, first of all, from the con- 
comitant arts — the frieze of the Parthenon without 
the metal bridles on the horses, for which the holes 
in the marble remain; isolation, secondly, from the 
architectural group of which, with most careful esti- 
mate of distance and point of observation, that frieze, 
for instance, was designed to be a part; isolation, 
thirdly, from the clear Greek skies, the poetical 
Greek life, in our modern galleries. And if one 
here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks 
himself of the required substitution; if he endeav- 
ours mentally to throw them back into that proper 
atmosphere, through which alone they can exercise 
over us all the magic by which they charmed their 
original spectators, the effort is not always a suc- 
cessful one, within the grey walls of the Louvre or 
the British Museum. 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 197 

And the circumstance that Greek sculpture is 
presented to us in such falsifying isolation from the 
work of the weaver, the carpenter, and the gold- 
smith, has encouraged a manner of regarding it too 
little sensuous. Approaching it with full informa- 
tion concerning what may be called the inner life of 
the Greeks, their modes of thought and sentiment 
amply recorded in the writings of the Greek poets 
and philosophers, but with no lively impressions of 
that mere craftsman's world of which so little has 
remained, students of antiquity have for the most 
part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture, 
rather as elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, 
as embodiments, in a sort of petrified language, of 
pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in con- 
nexion with the development of Greek intellect, 
than as elements of a sequence in the material order, 
as results of a designed and skilful dealing of accom- 
plished fingers with precious forms of matter for the 
delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come to be 
regarded as the product of a peculiarly limited art, 
dealing with a specially abstracted range of subjects; 
and the Greek sculptor as a workman almost exclu- 
sively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental 
connexion with the material in which his thought 
was expressed. He is fancied to have been dis- 



198 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

dainful of such matters as the mere tone, the fibre 
or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just 
perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like 
surface of the Venus of Melos; as being occupied 
only with forms as abstract almost as the conceptions 
of philosophy, and translateable it might be supposed 
into any material — a habit of regarding him still 
further encouraged by the modern sculptor's usage 
of employing merely mechanical labour in the actual 
working of the stone. 

The works of the highest Greek sculpture are 
indeed intellectiialised, if we may say so, to the 
utmost degree; the human figures which they present 
to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them, 
that profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is 
traceable in Greek art, continuously and increasingly, 
upwards from its simplest products, the oil-vessel 
or the urn, reaches its perfection. Yet, though the 
most abstract and intellectualised of sensuous objects, 
they are still sensuous and material, addressing them- 
selves, in the first instance, not to the purely reflec- 
tive faculty, but to the eye; and a complete criticism 
must have approached them from both sides — from 
the side of the intelligence indeed, towards which 
they rank as great thoughts come down into the 
stone; but from the sensuous side also, towards 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 199 

which they rank as the most perfect results of that 
pure skill of hand, of which the Venus of Melos, 
we may say, is the highest example, and the little 
polished pitcher or lamp, also perfect in its way, 
perhaps the lowest. 

To pass by the purely visible side of these things, 
then, is not only to miss a refining pleasure, but to 
mistake altogether the medium in which the most 
intellectual of the creations of Greek art, the ^gi- 
netan or the Elgin marbles, for instance, were actually 
produced; even these having, in their origin, de- 
pended for much of their charm on the mere mate- 
rial in which they were executed; and the whole 
black and grey world of extant antique sculpture 
needing to be translated back into ivory and gold, 
if we would feel the excitement which the Greek 
seems to have felt in the presence of these objects. 
To have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture, 
it is necessary to connect it, indeed, with the inner 
life of the Greek world, its thought and sentiment, 
on the one hand; but on the other hand to connect 
it, also, with the minor works of price, intaglios, 
coins, vases; with that whole system of material 
refinement and beauty in the outer Greek life, which 
these minor works represent to us; and it is with 
these, as far as possible, that we must seek to relieve 



200 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

the air of our galleries and museums of their too 
intellectual greyness. Greek sculpture could not 
have been precisely a cold thing; and, whatever a 
colour-blind school may say, pure thoughts have 
their coldness, a coldness which has sometimes 
repelled from Greek sculpture, with its unsuspected 
fund of passion and energy in material form, those 
who cared much, and with much insight, for a 
similar passion and energy in the coloured world of 
Italian painting. 

Theoretically, then, we need that world of the 
minor arts as a complementary background for the 
higher and more austere Greek sculpture; and, as 
matter of fact, it is just with such a world — with a 
period of refined and exquisite tectonics^ (as the 
Greeks called all crafts strictly subordinate to archi- 
tecture,) that Greek art actually begins, in what is 
called the Heroic Age, that earliest, undefined period 
of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot 
be dated, and which reaches down to the first 
Olympiad, about the year 776 b.c. Of this period 
we. possess, indeed, no direct history, and but few 
actual monuments, great or small; but as to its 
whole character and outward local colouring, for its 
art, as for its politics and religion. Homer may be 
regarded as an authority. The Iliad and the 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 201 

Odyssey, the earliest pictures of that heroic life, 
represent it as already delighting itself in the 
application of precious material and skilful handi- 
work to personal and domestic adornment, to the 
refining and beautifying of the entire outward 
aspect of life; above all, in the lavish application 
of very graceful metal-work to such purposes. And 
this representation is borne out by what little we 
possess of its actual remains, and by all we can 
infer. Mixed, of course, with mere fable, as a 
description of the heroic age, the picture which 
Homer presents to us, deprived of its supernatural 
adjuncts, becomes continuously more and more realis- 
able as the actual condition of early art, when we 
emerge gradually into historical time, and find our- 
selves at last among dateable works and real schools 
or masters. 

The history of Greek art, then, begins, as some 
have fancied general history to begin, in a golden 
age, but in an age, so to speak, of real gold, the 
period of those first twisters and hammerers of the 
precious metals — men who had already discovered 
the flexibility of silver and the ductility of gold, the 
capacity of both for infinite delicacy of handling, 
and who enjoyed, with complete freshness, a sense 
of beauty and fitness in their work — a period of 



202 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

which that flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked 
up lately in one of the graves at Mycenae, or the 
legendary golden honeycomb of Daedalus, might 
serve as the symbol. The heroic age of Greek art 
is the age of the hero as smith. 

There are in Homer two famous descriptive 
passages in which this delight in curious metal-work 
is very prominent; the description in the Iliad of 
the shield of Achilles,^ and the description of the 
house of Alcinous in the Odyssey.^ The shield of 
Achilles is part of the suit of armour which 
Hephaestus makes for him at the request of Thetis; 
and it is wrought of variously coloured metals, 
woven into a great circular composition in relief, 
representing the world and the life in it. The 
various activities of man are recorded in this descrip- 
tion in a series of idyllic incidents with such com- 
plete freshness, liveliness, and variety, that the reader 
from time to time may well forget himself, and fancy 
he is reading a mere description of the incidents 
of actual life. We peep into a little Greek town, 
and see in dainty miniature the bride coming from 
her chamber with torch-bearers and dancers, the 
people gazing from their doors, a quarrel between 

1 //. xviii. 468-608. 2 od. vii. 37-132. 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 203 

two persons in the market-place, the assembly of the 
elders to decide upon it. In another quartering is 
the spectacle of a city besieged, the walls defended 
by the old men, while the soldiers have stolen out 
and are lying in ambush. There is a fight on the 
river-bank; Ares and Athene, conspicuous in gold, 
and marked as divine persons by a scale larger than 
that of their followers, lead the host. The strange, 
mythical images of Ker, Eris, and Kudoimos mingle 
in the crowd. A third space upon the shield depicts 
the incidents of peaceful labour — the ploughshare 
passing through the field, of enamelled black metal 
behind it, and golden before; the cup of mead held 
out to the ploughman when he reaches the end of 
the furrow; the reapers with their sheaves; the king 
standing in silent pleasure among them, intent upon 
his staff. There are the labourers in the vineyard 
in minutest detail; stakes of silver on which the 
vines hang; the dark trench about it, and one path- 
way through the midst; the whole complete and 
distinct, in variously coloured metal. All things 
and living creatures are in their places — the cattle 
coming to water to the sound of the herdsman's 
pipe, various music, the rushes by the water-side, 
a lion-hunt with dogs, the pastures among the hills, 
a dance, the fair dresses of the male and female 



204 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

dancers, the former adorned with swords, the latter 
with crowns. It is an image of ancient life, its 
pleasure and business. For the centre, as in some 
quaint chart of the heavens, are the earth and the 
sun, the moon and constellations; and to close in 
all, right round, like a frame to the picture, the 
great river Oceanus, forming the rim of the shield, 
in some metal of dark blue. 

Still more fascinating, perhaps, because more com- 
pletely realisable by the fancy as an actual thing — 
realisable as a delightful place to pass time in — is 
the description of the palace of Alcinous in the 
little island town of the Phaeacians, to which we are 
introduced in all the liveliness .and sparkle of the 
morning, as real as something seen last summer on 
the sea-coast; although, appropriately, Ulysses meets 
a goddess, like a young girl carrying a pitcher, on 
his way up from the sea. Below the steep walls 
of the town, two projecting jetties allow a narrow 
passage into a haven of stone for the ships, into 
which the passer-by may look down, as they lie 
moored below the roadway. In the midst is the 
king's house, all glittering, again, wath curiously 
wrought metal; its brightness is **as the brightness 
of the sun or of the moon." The heart of Ulysses 
beats quickly when he sees it standing amid planta- 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 205 

tions ingeniously watered, its floor and walls of 
brass throughout, with continuous cornice of dark 
iron; the doors are of gold, the door-posts and 
lintels of silver, the handles, again, of gold — 

"The walls were massy brass; the cornice high 
Blue metals crowned in colours of the sky; 
Rich plates of gold the folding-doors incase; 
The pillars silver on a brazen base; 
Silver the lintels deep-projecting o'er; 
And gold the ringlets that command the door." 

Dogs of the same precious metals keep watch on 
either side, like the lions over the old gateway of 
Mycenae, or the gigantic, human-headed bulls at the 
entrance of an Assyrian palace. Within doors the 
burning lights at supper-time are supported in 
the hands of golden images of boys, while the guests 
recline on a couch running all along the wall, 
covered with peculiarly sumptuous women's work. 
From these two glittering descriptions manifestly 
something must be deducted; we are in wonder- 
land, and among supernatural or magical conditions. 
But the forging of the shield and the wonderful 
house of Alcinous are no merely incongruous episodes 
in Homer, but the consummation of what is always 
characteristic of him, a constant preoccupation, 
namely, with every form of lovely craftsmanship. 



206 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

resting on all things, as he says, like the shining of 
the sun. We seem to pass, in reading him, through 
the treasures of some royal collection; in him the 
presentation of almost'' every aspect of life is beau- 
tified by the work of cunning hands. The thrones, 
coffers, couches of curious carpentry, are studded 
with bossy ornaments of precious metal effectively 
disposed, or inlaid with stained ivory, or blue cyanus, 
or amber, or pale amber-like gold; the surfaces of 
the stone conduits, the sea-walls, the public washing- 
troughs, the ramparts on which the weary soldiers 
rest themselves when returned to Troy, are fair and 
smooth; all the fine qualities, in colour and texture, 
of woven stuff are carefully noted — the fineness, 
closeness, softness, pliancy, gloss, the whiteness or 
nectar-like tints in which the weaver delights to 
work; to weave the sea-purple threads is the appro- 
priate function of queens and noble women. All 
the Homeric shields are more or less ornamented 
with variously coloured metal, terrible sometimes, 
like Leonardo's, with some monster or grotesque. 
The numerous sorts of cups are bossed with golden 
studs, or have handles wrought with figures, of doves, 
for instance. The great brazen cauldrons bear an 
epithet which means flowery. The trappings of the 
horses, the various parts of the chariots, are formed 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 207 

of various metals. The women's ornaments and the 
instruments of their toilet are described — 

iropiras re yvafMirrds 6' eXt/cas, /cdXf/cds re /cat 6p/JL0VS 

— the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty 
are still undivided; all that men's hands are set to 
make has still a fascination alike for workmen and 
spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy, indeed, 
is especially conspicuous. But then Homer's Trojans 
are essentially Greeks — Greeks of Asia; and Troy, 
though more advanced in all elements of civilisation, 
is no real contrast to the western shore of the 
^gean. It is no bai^baric world that we see, but 
the sort of world, we may think, that would have 
charmed also our comparatively jaded sensibilities, 
with just that quaint simplicity which we too enjoy 
in its productions; above all, in its wrought metal, 
which loses perhaps more than any other sort of work 
by becoming mechanical. The metal-work which 
Homer describes in such variety is all hainmer-v^oxk^ 
all the joinings being effected by pins or riveting. 
That is just the sort of metal-work which, in a certain 
naivete and vigour, is still of all work the most ex- 
pressive of actual contact with dexterous fingers; one 
seems to trace in it, on every particle of the partially 
resisting material, the touch and play of the shaping 



208 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

instruments, in highly trained hands, under the guid- 
ance of exquisitely disciplined senses — that cachety 
or seal of nearness to the workman's hand, which is 
the special charm of all good metal-work, of early 
metal-work in particular. 

Such descriptions, however, it may be said, are 
mere poetical ornament, of no value in helping us 
to define the character of an age. But what is 
peculiar in these Homeric descriptions, what dis- 
tinguishes them from others at first sight similar, 
is a sort of internal evidence they present of a certain 
degree of reality, signs in them of an imagination 
stirred by surprise at the spectacle of real works 
of art. Such minute, delighted, loving description 
of details of ornament, such following out of the 
ways in which brass, gold, silver, or paler gold, 
go into the chariots and armour and women's dress, 
or cling to the walls — the enthusiasm of the manner 
— is the warrant of a certain amount of truth in all 
that. The Greek poet describes these things with 
the same vividness and freshness, the same kind of 
fondness, with which other poets speak of flowers; 
speaking of them poetically, indeed, but with that 
higher sort of poetry which seems full of the lively 
impression of delightful things recently seen. Genu- 
ine poetry, it is true, is always naturally sympathetic 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 209 

with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But 
with how many poets would not this constant intru- 
sion of material ornament have produced a tawdry 
effect! The metal would all be tarnished and the 
edges blurred. And this is because it is not always 
that the products of even exquisite tectonics can ex- 
cite or refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is proba- 
ble that the objects of oriental art, the imitations of 
it at home, in which for Homer this actual world of 
art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity, 
and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stim- 
ulate without surfeiting the imagination; it is an 
exotic thing of which he sees just enough and not too 
much. The shield of Achilles, the house of Alcinous, 
are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming 
winds continuously through the entire Iliad and 
Odyssey, — a child's dream after a day of real, fresh 
impressions from things themselves, in which all 
those floating impressions re-set themselves. He is 
as pleased in touching and looking at those objects 
as his own heroes; their gleaming aspect brightens 
all he says, and has taken hold, one might think, of 
his language, his very vocabulary becoming chrys- 
elephantine. Homer's artistic descriptions, though 
enlarged by fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the 
extant remains of monuments of the earliest histori- 
p 



210 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

cal age are like lingering relics of that dream in a 
tamer but real world. 

The art of the heroic age, then, as represented in 
Homer, connects itself, on the one side, with those 
fabulous jewels so prominent in mythological story, 
and entwined sometimes so oddly in its representa- 
tion of human fortunes — the necklace of Eriphyle, 
the necklace of Helen, which Menelaus, it was said, 
offered at Delphi to Athene Pronoea on the eve of 
his expedition against Troy — mythical objects, 
indeed, but which yet bear witness even thus early 
to the aesthetic susceptibility of the Greek temper. 
But, on the other hand, the art of the heroic age 
connects itself also with the actual early beginnings 
of artistic production. There are touches of reality, 
for instance, in Homer's incidental notices of its 
instruments and processes; especially as regards the 
working of metal. He goes already to the potter's 
wheel for familiar, life-like illustration. In describ- 
ing artistic wood-work he distinguishes various stages 
of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning 
and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer, 
whirled round with a string; he mentions the names 
of two artists, the one of an actual workman, the 
other of a craft turned into a proper name — stray 
relics, accidentally reserved, of a world, as we may 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 211 

believe, of such wide and varied activity. The forge 
of Hephaestus is a true forge; the magic tripods on 
which he is at work are really put together by con- 
ceivable processes, known in early times. Composi- 
tions in relief similar to those which he describes 
were actually made out of thin metal plates cut into 
a convenient shape, and then beaten into the designed 
form by the hammer over a wooden model. These 
reliefs were then fastened to a differently coloured 
metal background or base, with nails or rivets, for 
there is no soldering of metals as yet. To this pro- 
cess the ancients gave the name of empozstiky such 
embossing being still, in our own time, a beautiful 
form of metal-work. 

Even in the marvellous shield there are other and 
indirect notes of reality. In speaking of the shield 
of Achilles, I departed intentionally from the order 
in which the subjects of the relief are actually intro- 
duced in the Iliad, because, just then, I wished the 
reader to receive the full effect of the variety and 
elaborateness of the composition, as a representation 
or picture of the whole of ancient life embraced 
within the circumference of a shield. But in the 
order in which Homer actually describes those epi- 
sodes he is following the method of a very practicable 
form of composition, and is throughout much closer 



212 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

than we might at first sight suppose to the ancient 
armourer's proceedings. The shield is formed of 
five superimposed plates of different metals, each 
plate of smaller diameter than the one immediately 
below it, their flat margins showing thus as four con- 
centric stripes or rings of metal, around a sort of boss 
in the centre, five metals thick, and the outermost 
circle or ring being the thinnest. To this arrange- 
ment the order of Homer's description corresponds. 
The earth and the heavenly bodies are upon this boss 
in the centre, like a little distant heaven hung above 
the broad world, and from this Homer works out, 
round and round, to the river Oceanus, which forms 
the border of the whole; the subjects answering to, 
or supporting each other, in a. sort of heraldic order — 
the city at peace set over against the city besieged 

— spring, summer, and autumn balancing each other 

— quite congruously with a certain heraldic turn 
common in contemporary Assyrian art, which de- 
lights in this sort of conventional spacing out of its 
various subjects, and especially with some extant 
metal chargers of Assyrian work, which, like some 
of the earliest Greek vases with their painted plants 
and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate in 
their humble measure such heraldic grouping. 

The description of the shield of Hercules, attrib- 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 213 

uted to Hesiod, is probably an imitation of Homer, 
and, notwithstanding some fine mythological imper- 
sonations ^hich it contains, an imitation less admi- 
rable than the original. Of painting there are in 
Homer no certain indications, and it is consistent 
with the later date of the imitator that we may per- 
haps discern in his composition a sign that what he 
had actually seen was a painted shield, in the pre- 
dominance in it, as compared with the Homeric 
description, of effects of colour over effects of form; 
Homer delighting in ingenious devices for fastening 
the metal, and the supposed Hesiod rather in what 
seem like triumphs of heraldic colouring ; though the 
latter also delights in effects of mingled metals, of 
mingled gold and silver especially — silver figures 
with dresses of gold, silver centaurs with pine-trees 
of gold for staves in their hands. Still, like the 
shield of Achilles, this too we must conceive as 
formed of concentric plates of metal; and here again 
the spacing is still more elaborately carried out, nar- 
rower intermediate rings being apparently introduced 
between the broader ones, with figures in rapid, hori- 
zontal, unbroken motion, carrying the eye right round 
the shield, in contrast with the repose of the down- 
ward or inward movement of the subjects which 
divide the larger spaces; here too with certain analo- 



214 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

gies in the rows of animals to the designs on the 
earliest vases. 

In Hesiod then, as in Homer, there are Imdesigned 
notes of correspondence between the partly mythical 
ornaments imaginatively enlarged of the heroic age, 
and a world of actual handicrafts. In the shield of 
Hercules another marvellous detail is added in the 
image of Perseus, very daintily described as hovering 
in some wonderful way, as if really borne up by 
wings, above the surface. And that curious, haunt- 
ing sense of magic in art, which comes out over and 
over again in Homer — in the golden maids, for in- 
stance, who assist Hephaestus in his work, and simi- 
lar details which seem at first sight to destroy the 
credibility of the whole picture, and make of it a 
mere wonder-land — is itself also, rightly understood, 
a testimony to a real excellence in the art of Homer's 
time. It is sometimes said that works of art held to 
be miraculous are always of an inferior kind; but at 
least it was not among those who thought them infe- 
rior that the belief in their miraculous power began. 
If the golden images move like living creatures, and 
the armour of Achilles, so wonderfully made, lifts 
him like wings, this again is because the imagination 
of Homer is really under the stimulus of delightful 
artistic objects actually seen. Only those to whom 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 215 

such artistic objects manifest themselves through real 
and powerful impressions of their wonderful qualities, 
can invest them with properties magical or miracu- 
lous. 

I said that the inherent usefulness of the material 
of metal-work makes the destruction of its acquired 
form almost certain, if it comes into the possession 
of people either barbarous or careless of the work of 
a past time. Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a 
fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a 
somewhat visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, 
and more or less make substitution; and of the finer 
work of the heroic age, thus dimly discerned as an 
actual thing, we had at least till recently almost noth- 
ing. Two plates of bronze, a few rusty nails, and 
certain rows of holes in the inner surface of the walls 
of the "treasury" of Mycenae, were the sole repre- 
sentatives of that favourite device of primitive Greek 
art, the lining of stone walls with burnished metal, 
of which the house of Alcinous in the Odyssey is the 
ideal picture, and the temple of Pallas of the Brazen 
House 2X Sparta, adorned in the interior with a coat- 
ing of reliefs in metal, a later, historical example. 
Of the heroic or so-called Cyclopean architecture, 
that "treasury," a building so imposing that Pausa- 
nias thought it worthy to rank with the Pyramids, 



216 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

is a sufficient illustration. Treasury, or tomb, or 
both, (the selfish dead, perhaps, being supposed still 
to find enjoyment in the costly armour, goblets, and 
mirrors laid up there,) this dome-shaped building, 
formed of concentric rings of stones gradually dimin- 
ishing to a coping-stone at the top, may stand as the 
representative of some similar buildings in other 
parts of Greece, and of many others in a similar kind 
of architecture elsewhere, constructed of large many- 
sided blocks of stone, fitted carefully together with- 
out the aid of cement, and remaining in their places 
by reciprocal resistance. Characteristic of it is the 
general tendency to use vast blocks of stone for the 
jambs and lintels of doors, for instance, and in the 
construction of gable-shaped passages; two rows of 
such stones being made to rest against each other at 
an acute angle, within the thickness of the walls. 

So vast and rude, fretted by the action of nearly 
three thousand years, the fragments of this architect- 
ure may often seem, at first sight, like works of 
nature. At Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, the skeleton of 
the old architecture is more complete. At Mycenae 
the gateway of the acropolis is still standing with its 
two well-known sculptured lions — immemorial and 
almost unique monument of primitive Greek sculpt- 
ure — supporting, herald-wase, a symbolical pillar on 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 217 

the vast, triangular, pedimental stone above. The 
heads are gone, having been fashioned possibly in 
metal by workmen from the East. On what may be 
called the facade, remains are still discernible of 
inlaid work in coloured stone, and within the gate- 
way, on the smooth slabs of the pavement, the wheel- 
ruts are still visible. Connect them with those metal 
war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy 
the whole grandiose character of the place, as it may 
really have been. Shut within the narrow enclosure 
of these shadowy citadels were the palaces of the 
kings, with all that intimacy which we may some- 
times suppose to have been alien from the open-air 
Greek life, admitting, doubtless, below the cover of 
their rough walls, many of those refinements of 
princely life which the middle age found possible 
in such, places, and of which the impression is so 
fascinating in Homer's description, for instance, of 
the house of Ulysses, or of Menelaus at Sparta. 
Rough and frowning without, these old chateaux of 
the Argive kings were delicate within with a decora- 
tion almost as dainty and fine as the network of weed 
and flower that now covers their ruins, and of the 
delicacy of which, as I said, that golden flower on 
its silver stalk, or the golden honeycomb of Daedalus, 
might be taken as representative. In these metal- 



218 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

like structures of self-supporting polygons, locked so 
firmly and impenetrably together, with the whole 
mystery of the reasonableness of the arch implicitly 
within them, there is evidence of a complete artistic 
command overweight in stone, and an understanding 
of the "law of weight." But overweight only; the 
ornament still seems to be not strictly architectural, 
but, according to the notices of Homer, tectonic, 
borrowed from the sister arts, above all from the art 
of the metal-workers, to whom those spaces of the 
building are left which a later age fills with painting, 
or relief in stone. The skill of the Asiatic comes 
to adorn this rough native building; and it is a late, 
elaborate, somewhat voluptuous skill, we may under- 
stand, illustrated by the luxury of that Asiatic cham- 
ber of Paris, less like that of a warrior than of one 
going to the dance. Coupled with the vastness of 
the architectural works which actually remain, such 
descriptions as that in Homer of the chamber of 
Paris and the house of Alcinous furnish forth a pict- 
ure of that early period — the tyrants' age, the age 
of the ac7'opoleis, the period of great dynasties with 
claims to "divine right," and in many instances at 
least with all the culture of their time. The vast 
buildings make us sigh at the thought of wasted 
human labour, though there is a public usefulness 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 219 

too in some of these designs, such as the draining of 
the Copaic lake, to which the backs of the people are 
bent whether they will or not. For the princes there 
is much of that selfish personal luxury which is a con- 
stant trait of feudalism in all ages. For the people, 
scattered over the country, at their agricultural labour, 
or gathered in small hamlets, there is some enjoy- 
ment, perhaps, of the aspect of that splendour, of 
the bright warriors on the heights — a certain share 
of the nobler pride of the tyrants themselves in those 
tombs and dwellings. Some surmise, also, there 
seems to have been, of the ^^ curse" of gold, with a 
dim, lurking suspicion of curious facilities for cruelty 
in the command over those skilful artificers in metal 

— some ingenious rack or bull ^^to pinch and peel " 

— the tradition of which, not unlike the modern 
Jacques. Bonhomme's shudder at the old ruined French 
donjon or bastille, haunts, generations afterwards, 
the ruins of those ^^labyrinths'' of stone, where the 
old tyrants had their pleasures. For it is a mistake 
to suppose that that wistful sense of eeriness in ruined 
buildings, to which most of us are susceptible, is an 
exclusively modern feeling. The name Cyclopean, 
attached to those desolate remains of buildings which 
were older than Greek history itself, attests their 
romantic influence over the fancy of the people who 



220 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

thus attributed them to a superhuman strength and 
skill. And the Cyclopes, like all the early mythical 
names of artists, have this note of reality, that they 
are names not of individuals but of classes, the 
guilds or companies of workmen in which a certain 
craft was imparted and transmitted. The Dactyli, 
the Fi?igers, are the first workers in iron; the savage 
Chalybes in Scythia the first smelters; actual names 
are given to the old, fabled Telchines — Chalkon, 
Argyron, Chryson — workers in brass, silver, and 
gold, respectively. The tradition of their activity 
haunts the several regions where those metals were 
found. They make the trident of Poseidon; but 
then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's instru- 
ment, the tunny-fork. They are credited, notwith- 
standing, with an evil sorcery, unfriendly to men, as 
poor humanity remembered the makers of chains, 
locks, Procrustean beds; and, as becomes this dark, 
recondite mine and metal work, the traditions about 
them are gloomy and grotesque, confusing mortal 
workmen with demon guilds. 

To this view of the heroic age of Greek art as 
being, so to speak, an age of real gold, an age de- 
lighting itself in precious material and exquisite 
handiwork in all tectonic crafts, the recent extraordi- 
nary discoveries at Troy and Mycenae are, on any 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 221 

plausible theory of their date and origin, a witness. 
The aesthetic critic needs always to be on his guard 
against the confusion of mere curiosity or antiquity 
with beauty in art. Among the objects discovered 
at Troy — mere curiosities, some of them, however 
interesting and instructive — the so-called royal cup 
of Priam, in solid gold, two-handled and double- 
lipped, (the smaller lip designed for the host and his 
libation, the larger for the guest,) has, in the very 
simplicity of its design, the grace of the economy 
with which it exactly fulfils its purpose, a positive 
beauty, an absolute value for the aesthetic sense, 
while strange and new enough, if it really settles at 
last a much-debated expression of Homer; while the 
"diadem," with its twisted chains and flowers of pale 
gold, shows that those profuse golden fringes, waving 
so comely as he moved, which Hephaestus wrought 
for the helmet of Achilles, were really within the 
compass of early Greek art. 

And the story of the excavations at Mycenae reads 
more like some well-devised chapter of fiction than 
a record of sober facts. Here, those sanguine, half- 
childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in 
dead men's graves, which seem to have a charm for 
every one, are more than fulfilled in the spectacle of 
those antique kings, lying in the splendour of their 



222 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

crowns and breast-plates of embossed plate of gold; 
their swords, studded with golden imagery, at their 
sides, as in some feudal monument; their very faces 
covered up most strangely in golden masks. The 
very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick with 
gold-dust — the heavy gilding fallen from some per- 
ished kingly vestment; in another was a downfall of 
golden leaves and flowers; and, amid this profusion 
of thin fine fragments, w^ere rings, bracelets, smaller 
crowns as if for children, dainty butterflies for orna- 
ments of dresses, and that golden flower on a silver 
stalk — all of pure, soft gold, unhardened by alloy, 
the delicate films of which one must touch but lightly, 
yet twisted and beaten, by hand and hammer, into 
wavy, spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long undu- 
lating arms appearing frequently. 

It is the very image of the old luxurious life of the 
princes of the heroic age, as Homer describes it, 
with the arts in service to its kingly pride. Among 
the other costly objects was one representing the 
head of a cow, grandly designed in gold with horns 
of silver, like the horns of the moon, supposed to be 
symbolical of Here, the great object of worship at 
Argos. One of the interests of the study of mythol- 
ogy is that it reflects the ways of life and thought of 
the people who conceived it; and this religion of 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 223 

Here, the special religion of Argos, is congruous 
with what has been here said as to the place of art 
in the civilisation of the Argives ; it is a reflexion of 
that splendid and wanton old feudal life. For Here 
is, in her original essence and meaning, equivalent 
to Demeter — the one living spirit of the earth, 
divined behind the veil of all its manifold visible 
energies. But in the development of a common 
mythological motive the various peoples are subject 
to the general limitations of their life and thought; 
they can but work outward what is within them; and 
the religious conceptions and usages, ultimately de- 
rivable from one and the same rudimentary instinct, 
are sometimes most diverse. Out of the visible, 
physical energies of the earth and its system of annual 
change, the old Pelasgian mind developed the person 
of Demeter, mystical and profoundly aweful, yet pro- 
foundly pathetic, also, in her appeal to human sym- 
pathies. Out of the same original elements, the 
civilisation of Argos, on the other hand, develops 
the religion of Queen Here, a mere Demeter, at best, 
of gaudy flower-beds, whose toilet Homer describes 
with all its delicate fineries; though, characteristi- 
cally, he may still allow us to detect, perhaps, some 
traces of the mystical person of the earth, in the all- 
pervading scent of the ambrosial unguent with which 



224 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

she anoints herself, in the abundant tresses of her 
hair, and in the curious variegation of her ornaments. 
She has become, though with some reminiscence of 
the mystical earth, a very limited human person, 
wicked, angry, jealous — the lady of Zeus in her 
castle-sanctuary at Mycenae, in wanton dalliance 
with the king, coaxing him for cruel purposes in 
sweet sleep, adding artificial charms to her beauty. 

Such are some of the characteristics with which 
Greek art is discernible in that earliest age. Of 
themselves, they almost answer the question which 
next arises — Whence did art come to Greece? or 
was it a thing of absolutely native growth there? So 
some have decidedly maintained. Others, who lived 
in an age possessing little or no knowledge of Greek 
monuments anterior to the full development of art 
under Pheidias, and who, in regard to the Greek 
sculpture of the age of Pheidias, were like people 
criticising Michelangelo, without knowledge of the 
earlier Tuscan school — of the works of Donatello 
and Mino da Fiesole — easily satisfied themselves 
with theories of its importation ready-made from 
other countries. Critics in the last century, espe- 
cially, noticing some characteristics which early Greek 
work has in common, indeed, with Egyptian art, 
but which are common also to all such early work 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 225 

everywhere, supposed, as a matter of course, that it 
came, as the Greek religion also, from Egypt — that 
old, immemorial, half-known birthplace of all won- 
derful things. There are, it is true, authorities for 
this derivation among the Greeks themselves, dazzled 
as they were by the marvels of the ancient civilisa- 
tion of Egypt, a civilisation so different from their 
own, on the first opening of Egypt to Greek visitors. 
But, in fact, that opening did not take place till the 
reign of Psammetichus, about the middle of the 
seventh century b.c, a relatively late date. Psam- 
metichus introduced and settled Greek mercenaries 
in Egypt, and, for a time, the Greeks came very close 
to Egyptian life. They can hardly fail to have been 
stimulated by that display of every kind of artistic 
workmanship gleaming over the whole of life; they 
may in turn have freshened it with new motives. 
And we may remark, that but for the peculiar usage 
of Egypt concerning the tombs of the dead, but for 
their habit of investing the last abodes of the dead 
with all the appurtenances of active life, out of that 
whole world of art, so various and elaborate, nothing 
but the great, monumental works in stone would have 
remained to ourselves. We should have experienced 
in regard to it, what we actually experience too much 
in our knowledge of Greek art — the lack of a fitting 
Q 



226 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

background, in the smaller tectonic work, for its 
great works in architecture, and the bolder sort of 
sculpture. 

But, one by one, at last, as in the medieval par- 
allel, monuments illustrative of the earlier growth of 
Greek art before the time of Pheidias have come to 
light, and to a just appreciation. They show that 
the development of Greek art had already proceeded 
some way before the opening of Egypt to the Greeks, 
and point, if to a foreign source at all, to oriental 
rather than Egyptian influences; and the theory 
which derived Greek art, with many other Greek 
things, from Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In 
Greece all things are at once old and new. As, in 
physical organisms, the actual particles of matter 
have existed long before in other combinations; and 
what is really new in a new organism is the new co- 
hering force — the mode of life — so, in the products 
of Greek civilisation, the actual elements are tracea- 
ble elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; 
the elements, for instance, of its peculiar national 
architecture. Yet all is also emphatically autochtho- 
nous, as the Greeks said, new-born at home, by right 
of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over 
those mere elements, and touching them, above all, 
with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 227 

man — the dignity of his soul and of his body — so 
that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers. Still, 
the original and primary motive seems, in matters 
of art, to have come from without; and the view to 
which actual discovery and all true analogies more 
and more point is that of a connexion of the origin 
of Greek art, ultimately with Assyria, proximately 
with Phoenicia, partly through Asia Minor, and chiefly 
through Cyprus — an original connexion again and 
again reasserted, like a surviving trick of inheritance, 
as in later times it came in contact with the civilisa- 
tion of Caria and Lycia, old affinities being here 
linked anew; and with a certain Asiatic tradition, 
of which one representative is the Ionic style of 
architecture, traceable all through Greek art — an 
Asiatic curiousness, or TroiKiXia, strongest in that 
heroic age of which I have been speaking, and dis- 
tinguishing some schools and masters in Greece more 
than others; and always in appreciable distinction 
from the more clearly defined and self-asserted Hel- 
lenic influence. Homer himself witnesses to the 
intercourse, through early, adventurous commerce, 
as in the bright and animated picture with which the 
history of Herodotus begins, between the Greeks and 
Eastern countries. We may, perhaps, forget some- 
times, thinking over the greatness of its place in the 



228 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

history of civilisation, how small a country Greece 
really was; how short the distances onwards, from 
island to island, to the coast of Asia, so that we can 
hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and 
Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of 
importation, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influ- 
ences, by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon 
Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was 
right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with 
inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen 
on the Western shore, and perhaps proportionally 
weaker on the practical or moral side, and with an 
element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, 
typified by the cedar and gold of the chamber of 
Paris — an element which the austere, more strictly 
European influence of the Dorian Apollo will one 
day correct in all genuine Greeks. The ^gean, 
with its islands, is, then, a bond of union, not a bar- 
rier; and we must think of Greece, as has been 
rightly said, as its whole continuous shore. 

The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in the 
heroic age, so far as we can discern them, are those 
also of Phoenician art, its delight in metal among the 
rest, of metal especially as an element in architect- 
ure, the covering of everything with plates of metal. 
It was from Phoenicia that the costly material in 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 229 

which early Greek art delighted actually came — 
ivory, amber, much of the precious metals. These 
the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return 
for the mussel which contained the famous purple, 
in quest of which they penetrated far into all the 
Greek havens. Recent discoveries present the island 
of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper- 
work in ancient times, as the special mediator be- 
tween the art of Phoenicia and Greece; and in some 
archaic figures of Aphrodite with her dove, brought 
from Cyprus and now in the British Museum — ob- 
jects you might think, at first sight, taken from the 
niches of a French Gothic cathedral — are some of 
the beginnings, at least, of Greek sculpture mani- 
festly under the influence of Phoenician masters. 
And, again, mythology is the reflex of characteristic 
facts. It is through Cyprus that the religion of 
Aphrodite comes from Phoenicia to Greece. Here, 
in Cyprus, she is connected with some other kindred 
elements of mythological tradition, above all with 
the beautiful old story of Pygmalion, in which the 
thoughts of art and love are connected so closely 
together. First of all, on the prows of the Phoeni- 
cian ships, the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euplcea, 
.the protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus — to 
Cythera; it is in this simplest sense that she is. 



230 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

primarily, Anadyomene, And her connexion with 
the arts is always an intimate one. In Cyprus her 
worship is connected with an architecture, not colos- 
sal, but full of dainty splendour — the art of the 
shrine-maker, the maker of reliquaries; the art of 
the toilet, the toilet of Aphrodite; the Homeric 
hymn to Aphrodite is full of all that; delight in 
which we have seen to be characteristic of the true 
Homer. 

And now we see why Hephaestus, that .crook-backed 
and uncomely god, is the husband of Aphrodite. 
Hephaestus is the god of fire, indeed; as fire he is 
flung from heaven by Zeus; and in the marvellous 
contest between Achilles and the river Xanthus in 
the twenty-first book of the Iliad, he intervenes in 
favour of the hero, as mere fire against water. But 
he soon ceases to be thus generally representative of 
the functions of fire, and becomes almost exclusively 
representative of one only of its aspects, its function, 
namely, in regard to early art; he becomes the patron 
of smiths, bent with his labour at the forge, as people 
had seen such real workers; he is the most perfectly 
developed of all the Daedali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri. 
That the god of fire becomes the god of all art, archi- 
tecture included, so that he makes the houses of the. 
gods, and is also the husband of Aphrodite; marks a 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 231 

threefold group of facts; the prominence, first, of a 
peculiar kind of art in early Greece, that beautiful 
metal-work, with which he is bound and bent; 
secondly, the connexion of this, through Aphrodite, 
with an almost wanton personal splendour; the con- 
nexion, thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia, 
whence, literally. Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus is 
the "spiritual form " of the Asiatic element in Greek 
art. 

This, then, is the situation which the first period 
of Greek art comprehends; a people whose civilisa- 
tion is still young, delighting, as the young do, in 
ornament, in the sensuous beauty of ivory and gold, 
in all the lovely productions of skilled fingers. They 
receive all this, together with the worship of Aphro- 
dite, by way of Cyprus^ from Phoenicia, from the 
older, decrepit Eastern civilisation, itself long since 
surfeited with that splendour; and they receive it in 
frugal quantity, so frugal that their thoughts always 
go back to the East, where there is the fulness of it, 
as to a wonder- land of art. Received thus in frugal 
quantity, through many generations, that world of 
Asiatic tectonics stimulates the sensuous capacity in 
them, accustoms the hand to produce and the eye to 
appreciate the more delicately enjoyable qualities of 
material things. But nowhere in all this various and 



232 BEGIXXIXGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

exquisite world of design is there as yet any adequate 
sense of man himself, nowhere is there an insight 
into or power over human form as the expression of 
human soul. Yet those arts of design in which that 
younger people delights have in them already, as 
designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that 
expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to 
ends, of which the fully developed admirableness of 
human form is but the consummation — a consum- 
mation already anticipated in the grand and animated 
figures of epic poetry, their power of thought, their 
laughter and tears. Under the hands of that younger 
people, as they imitate and pass largely and freely 
beyond those older craftsmen, the fire of the reasona- 
ble soul will kindle, little by little, up to the Theseus 
of the Parthenon and the Venus of Melos. 

The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all other 
art, is to deal, indeed, with the deepest elements of 
man's nature and destiny, to command and express 
these, but to deal with them in a manner, and with 
a kind of expression, as clear and graceful and sim- 
ple, if it may be, as that of the Japanese flower- 
painter. And what the student of Greek sculpture 
has to cultivate generally in himself is the capacity 
for appreciating the expression of thought in outward 
form, the constant habit of associating sense with 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 233 

soul, of tracing what we call expression to its sources. 
But, concurrently with this, he must also cultivate, 
all along, a not less equally constant appreciation of 
intelligent workmafiship in work, and of design in 
things designed, of the rational control of matter 
everywhere. From many sources he may feed this 
sense of intelligence and design in the productions 
of the minor crafts, above all in the various and 
exquisite art of Japan. Carrying a delicacy like that 
of nature itself into every form of imitation, repro- 
duction and combination — leaf and flower, fish and 
bird, reed and water — and failing only when it 
touches the sacred human form, that art of Japan is 
not so unlike the earliest stages of Greek art as might 
at first sight be supposed. We have here, and in no 
mere fragments, the spectacle of a universal applica- 
tion to the instruments of daily life of fitness and 
beauty, in a temper still unsophisticated, as also un- 
elevated, by the divination of the spirit of man. 
And at least the student must always remember that 
Greek art was throughout a much richer and warmer 
thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a 
dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the illus- 
trations of a classical dictionary might induce him 
to think. Some of the ancient temples of Greece 
were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous 



234 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

modern museum. That iVsiatic TroiKiXia, that spirit 
of minute and curious loveliness, follows the bolder 
imaginative efforts of Greek art all through its his- 
tory, and one can hardly be too careful in keeping 
up the sense of this daintiness of execution through 
the entire course of its development. It is not only 
that the minute object of art, the tiny vase-painting, 
intaglio, coin, or cameo, often reduces into the palm 
of the hand lines grander than those of many a life- 
sized or colossal figure; but there is also a sense in 
which it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for 
instance, is but a supremely well- executed object of 
vertu, in the most limited sense of the term. Those 
solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a perfect 
embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable 
soul and of a spiritual world; they are also the best 
made things of their kind, as an urn or a cup is well 
made. 

A perfect, many-sided development of tectonic 
crafts, a state such as the art of some nations has 
ended in, becomes for the Greeks a mere opportu- 
nity, a mere starting-ground for their imaginative 
presentment of man, moral and inspired. A world 
of material splendour, moulded clay, beaten gold, 
polished stone ; — the informing, reasonable soul 
entering into that, reclaiming the metal and stone 



THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 235 

and clay, till they are as full of living breath as the 
real warm body itself; the presence of those two ele- 
ments is continuous throughout the fortunes of Greek 
art after the heroic age, and the constant right esti- 
mate of their action and reaction, from period to 
period, its true philosophy. 



236 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 



II. THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 

Critics of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it 
as if it had been ahvays work in colourless stone, 
against an almost colourless background. Its real 
background, as I have tried to show, was a world of 
exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest de- 
tails of daily life with splendour and skill, in close 
correspondence with a peculiarly animated develop- 
ment of human existence — the energetic movement 
and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worth- 
ily clothed — amid scenery as poetic as Titian's. If 
shapes of colourless stone did come into that back- 
ground, it was as the undraped human form comes 
into some of Titian's pictures, only to cool and sol- 
emnise its splendour: the work of the Greek sculp- 
tor being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always 
or chiefly in fastidiously selected marble even, but 
often in richly toned metal, (this or that sculptor 
preferring some special variety of the bronze he 
worked in, such as the hepatizon or liver-coloured 
bronze, or the bright golden alloy of Corinth,) and 
in. its consummate products chryselephantine, — work 
in gold and ivory, on a core of cedar. Pheidias, in 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 237 

the Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the Parthenon, 
fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths' age, 
dimly discerned in Homer, already delighted in; 
and the celebrated work of which I have first to speak 
now, and with which Greek sculpture emerges from 
that half-mythical age and becomes in a certain sense 
historical, is a link in that goldsmiths' or chrysele- 
phantine tradition, carrying us forwards to the work 
of Pheidias, backwards to the elaborate Asiatic fur- 
niture of the chamber of Paris. 

When Pausanias visited Olympia, towards the end 
of the second century after Christ, he beheld, among 
other precious objects in the temple of Here, a 
splendidly wTought treasure-chest of cedar-wood, in 
which, according to a legend, quick as usual wath 
the true human colouring, the mother of Cypselus 
had hidden him, when a child, from the enmity of 
her family, the BacchiadcB, then the nobility of Cor- 
inth. The child, named Cypselus after this incident, 
( Cypsele being a Corinthian word for chesty ) became 
tyrant of Corinth, and his grateful descendants, as it 
was said, offered the beautiful old chest to the temple 
of Here, as a memorial of his preservation. That 
would have been not long after the year 625 b.c. 
So much for the story which Pausanias heard — but 
inherent probability, and some points of detail in 



238 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

his description, tend to fix the origin of the chest at 
a date at least somewhat later; and as Herodotus, 
telling the story of the concealment of Cypselus, does 
not mention the dedication of the chest at Olympia 
at all, it may perhaps have been only one of many 
later imitations of antique art. But, whatever its 
date, Pausanias certainly saw the thing, and has left 
a long description of it, and we may trust his judg- 
ment at least as to its archaic style. We have here, 
then, something plainly visible at a comparatively 
recent date, something quite different from those 
perhaps wholly mythical objects described in Homer, 
— an object which seemed to so experienced an ob- 
server as Pausanias an actual work of earliest Greek 
art. Relatively to later Greek art, it may have 
seemed to him, what the ancient bronze doors with 
their Scripture histories, which we may still see in 
the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to 
later Italian art. 

Pausanias tells us nothing as to its size, nor di- 
rectly as to its shape. It may, for anything he says, 
have been oval, but it was probably rectangular, with 
a broad front and two narrow sides, standing, as the 
maker of it had designed, against the wall; for, in 
enumerating the various subjects wrought upon it, in 
five rows one above another, he seems to proceed, 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 239 

beginning at the bottom on the right-hand side, along 
the front from right to left, and then back again, 
through the second row from left to right, and, alter- 
nating thus, upwards to the last subject, at the top, 
on the left-hand side. 

The subjects represented, most of which had their 
legends attached in difficult archaic writing, were 
taken freely, though probably with a leading idea, 
out of various poetic cycles, as treated in the works 
of those so-called cyclic poets, who continued the 
Homeric tradition. Pausanias speaks, as Homer 
does in his description of the shield of Achilles, of 
a kind and amount of expression in feature and 
gesture certainly beyond the compass of any early 
art, and we may believe we have in these touches only 
what the visitor heard from enthusiastic exegetce, the 
interpreters or sacristans; though any one who has 
seen the Bayeux tapestry, for instance, must recog- 
nise the pathos and energy of which, when really 
prompted by genius, even the earliest hand is capa- 
ble. Some ingenious attempts have been made to 
restore the grouping of the scenes, with a certain 
formal expansion or balancing of subjects, their fig- 
ures and dimensions, in true Assyrian manner, on the 
front and sides. We notice some fine emblematic 
figures, the germs of great artistic motives in after 



240 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

times, already playing their parts there, — Death, and 
Sleep, and Night, " There was a woman supporting 
on her right arm a white child sleeping; and on the 
other arm she held a dark child, as if asleep; and 
they lay with their feet crossed. And the inscrip- 
tion shows, what might be understood without it, 
that they are Death and Sleep, and Night, the nurse 
of both of them." 

But what is most noticeable is, as I have already 
said, that this work, like the chamber of Paris, like 
the Zeus of Pheidias, is chryselephantine, its main 
fabric cedar, and the figures upon it partly of ivory, 
partly of gold,-^ but (and this is the most peculiar 
characteristic of its style) partly wrought out of the 
wood of the chest itself. And, as we read the de- 
scription, we can hardly help distributing in fancy 
gold and ivory, respectively, to their appropriate 
functions in the representation. The cup of Diony- 
sus, and the wings of certain horses there, Pausanias 
himself tells us were golden. Were not the apples 
of the Hesperides, the necklace of Eriphyle, the 
bridles, the armour, the unsheathed sword in the hand 
of Amphiaraus, also of gold? Were not the other 
children, like the white image of Sleep, especially 

1 Xpvo-oOv is the word Pausanias uses, of the cup in the hand of 
Dionysus — the wood \v2iS plated with gold. 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 241 

the naked child Alcmaeon, of ivory? with Alcestis 
and Helen, and that one of the Dioscuri whose beard 
was still imgrown? Were not ivory and gold, again, 
combined in the throne of Hercules, and in the 
three goddesses conducted before Paris? 

The *^ chest of Cypselus " fitly introduces the first 
historical period of Greek art, a period coming 
down to about the year 560 B.C., and the government 
of Pisistratus at Athens; a period of tyrants like 
Cypselus and Pisistratus himself, men of strong, 
sometimes unscrupulous individuality, but often also 
acute and cultivated patrons of the arts. It begins 
with a series of inventions, one here and another 
there, — inventions still for the most part technical, 
but which are attached to single names; for, with the 
growth of art, the influence of individuals, gifted for 
the opening of new ways, more and more defines 
itself; and the school, open to all comers, from 
which in turn the disciples may pass to all parts of 
Greece, takes the place of the family, in which the 
knowledge of art descends as a tradition from father 
to son, or of the mere trade-guild. Of these early 
industries we know little but the stray notices of 
Pausanias, often ambiguous, always of doubtful credi- 
bility. What we do see, through these imperfect 
notices, is a real period of animated artistic activity, 



V 



242 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

richly rewarded. Byzes of Naxos, for instance, is 
recorded as having first adopted the plan of sawing 
marble into thin plates for use on the roofs of tem- 
ples instead of tiles; and that his name has come 
down to us at all, testifies to the impression this fair 
white surface made on its first spectators. Various 
islands of the ^gean become each the source of 
some new artistic device. It is a period still under 
the reign of Hephaestus, delighting, above all, in 
magnificent metal-work. "The Samians," says He- 
rodotus, " out of a tenth part of their profits — a sum 
of six talents — caused a mixing vessel of bronze to 
be made, after the Argolic fashion; around it are 
projections of griffins' heads; and they dedicated it 
in the temple of Here, placing beneath it three 
colossal figures of bronze, seven cubits in height, 
leaning upon their knees." That was in the thirty- 
seventh Olympiad, and may be regarded as character- 
istic of the age. For the popular imagination, a 
kind of glamour, some mysterious connexion of the 
thing with human fortunes, still attaches to the curi- 
ous product of artistic hands, to the ring of Poly- 
crates, for instance, with its early specimen of 
engraved smaragdics^ as to the mythical necklace of 
Harmonia. Pheidon of Argos first makes coined 
money, and the obelisci — the old nail-shaped iron 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 243 

money, now disused — are hung up in the temple of 
Here; for, even thus early, the temples are in the 
way of becoming museums. Names like those of 
Eucheir and Eugrammus, who were said to have 
taken the art of baking clay vases from Samos to 
Etruria, have still a legendary air, yet may be real 
surnames; as in the case of Smilis, whose name is 
derived from a graver's tool, and who made the an- 
cient image of Here at Samos. Corinth — mater 
statuarice — becomes a great nursery of art at an 
early time. Some time before the twenty-ninth 
Olympiad, Butades of Sicyon, the potter, settled 
there. The record of early inventions in Greece is 
sometimes fondly coloured with human sentiment or 
incident. It is on the butterfly wing of such an 
incident — the love-sick daughter of the artist, who 
outlines on the wall the profile of her lover as he 
sleeps in the lamplight, to keep by her in absence 
— that the name of Butades the potter has come 
down to us. The father fills up the outline, long 
preserved, it was believed, in the Ny?7iphceii77i at Cor- 
inth, and hence the art of modelling from the life 
in clay. He learns, further, a way of colouring his 
clay red, and fixes his masks along the temple eaves. 
The temple of Athene Chalcioecus — Athene of the 
brazen house — at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, cele- 



244 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

brated about this time as architect, statuary, and 
poet; who made, besides the image in her shrine, 
and besides other Dorian songs, a hymn to the god- 
dess — was so called from its crust or lining of bronze 
plates, setting forth, in richly embossed imagery, 
various subjects of ancient legend. What Pausanias, 
who saw it, describes, is like an elaborate develop- 
ment of that method of covering the interiors of 
stone buildings with metal plates, of which the 
"Treasury " at Mycenae is the earliest historical, and 
the house of Alcinous the heroic, type. In the pages 
of Pausanias, that glitter, "as of the moon or the 
sun," which Ulysses stood still to wonder at, may 
still be felt. And on the right hand of this "brazen 
house," he tells us, stood an image of Zeus, also of 
bronze, the most ancient of all images of bronze. 
This had not been cast, nor wrought out of a single 
mass of metal, but, the various parts having been 
finished separately (probably beaten to shape with 
the hammer over a wooden mould), had been fitted 
together with nails or rivets. That was the earliest 
method of uniting the various parts of a work in 
metal — image, or vessel, or breastplate — a method 
allowing of much dainty handling of the cunning 
pins and rivets, and one which has its place still, in 
perfectly accomplished metal-work, as in the eques- 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 245 

trian statue of Bartolommeo Coleoni, by Andrea Ver- 
rocchio, in the piazza of St. John and St. Paul at 
Venice. In the British Museum there is a very early 
specimen of it, — a large egg-shaped vessel, fitted 
together of several pieces, the projecting pins or 
rivets, forming a sort of diadem round the middle, 
being still sharp in form and heavily gilt. That 
method gave place in time to a defter means of join- 
ing the parts together, with more perfect unity and 
smoothness of surface, the art of soldering; and the 
invention of this art — of soldering iron, in the first 
instance — is coupled with the name of Glaucus of 
Chios, a name which, in connexion with this and 
other devices for facilitating the mechanical pro- 
cesses of art, — for perfecting artistic effect with 
economy of labour, — became proverbial, the "art of 
Glaucus " being attributed to those who work well 
with rapidity and ease. 

Far more fruitful still was the invention of casting, 
of casting hollow figures especially, attributed to 
Rhcecus and Theodorus, architects of the great tem- 
ple at Samos. Such hollow figures, able, in conse- 
quence of their lightness, to rest, almost like an 
inflated bladder, on a single point — the entire bulk 
of a heroic rider, for instance, on the point of his 
horse's tail — admit of a much freer distribution of 



246 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

the whole weight or mass required, than is possible 
in any other mode of statuary; and the invention of 
the art of casting is really the discovery of liberty in 
composition.-^ 

And, at last, about the year 576 B.C., we come to 
the first true school of sculptors, the first clear exam- 
ple, as we seem to discern, of a communicable style, 
reflecting and interpreting some real individuality 
(the double personality, in this case, of two brothers) 
in the masters who evolved it, conveyed to disciples 
who came to acquire it from distant places, and tak- 
ing root through them at various centres, where the 
names of the masters became attached, of course, to 
many fair works really by the hands of the pupils. 
Dipoenus and Scyllis, these first true masters, were 
born in Crete; but their work is connected mainly 
with Sicyon, at that time the chief seat of Greek 

1 Pausanias, in recording the invention of casting, uses the word 
e^wt'euo-arTo, but does not tell us whether the model was of wax, as 
in the later process; which, however, is believed to have been the 
case. For an animated account of the modern process : — the core 
of plaister roughly presenting the designed form ; the modelling of 
the waxen surface thereon, like the skin upon the muscles, with all 
its delicate touches — vein and eyebrow; — the hardening of the 
plaister envelope, layer over layer, upon this deUcately finished 
model; the melting of the wax by heat, leaving behind it in its 
place the finished design i7i vacuo, which the molten stream of 
metal subsequently fills; released finally, after coohng, from core 
and envelope — see Fortnum's Handbook of ^r^w^^j-, Chapter II. 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 247 

art. "In consequence of some injury done them," 
it is said, " while employed there upon certain sacred 
images, they departed to another place, leaving their 
work unfinished; and, not long afterwards, a grievous 
famine fell upon Sicyon. Thereupon, the people of 
Sicyon, inquiring of the Pythian Apollo how they 
might be relieved, it was answered them, * if Dipoenus 
and Scyllis should finish those images of the gods; ' 
which thing the Sicyonians obtained from them, 
humbly, at a great price." That story too, as we 
shall see, illustrates the spirit of the age. For their 
sculpture they used the white marble of Paros, being 
workers in marble especially, though they worked 
also in ebony and in ivory, and made use of gilding. 
" Figures of cedar-wood, partly incruste with gold " 
— KeSpov ^ioSia XP^^4^ Sirjvdio-fjiiva — Pausanias says 
exquisitely, describing a certain work of their pupil, 
Dontas of Lacedaemon. It is to that that we have 
definitely come at last, in the school of Dipoenus and 
Scyllis. 

Dry and brief as these details may seem, they are 
the witness to an active, eager, animated period of 
inventions and beginnings, in which the Greek 
workman triumphs over the first rough mechanical 
difficulties which beset him in the endeavour to 
record what his soul conceived of the form of priest 



248 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

or athlete then alive upon the earth, or of the ever- 
living gods, then already more seldom seen upon it. 
Our own fancy must fill up the story of the unre- 
corded patience of the work-shop, into which we 
seem to peep through these scanty notices — the 
fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, 
ending at last in that moment of success, which is all 
Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly. 

And as this period begins with the chest of Cypse- 
lus, so it ends with a work in some respects similar, 
also seen and described by Pausanias — the throne, 
as he calls it, of the Amyclcean Apollo, It was the 
work of a well-known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia, 
who, probably about the year 550 B.C., with a com- 
pany of workmen, came to the little ancient town of 
Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of traditions of the 
heroic age. He had been invited thither to perform 
a peculiar task — the construction of a throne ; not 
like the throne of the Olympian Zeus, and others 
numerous in after times, for a seated figure, but for 
the image of the local Apollo; no other than a rude 
and very ancient pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high, 
to which, Hermes-wise, head, arms and feet were 
attached. The thing stood upright, as on a base, 
upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which, accord- 
ing to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 249 

Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved 
by Apollo for his beauty, and accidentally struck 
dead by him in play, with a quoit. From the drops 
of the lad's blood had sprung up the purple flower 
of his name, which bears on its petals the letters of 
the ejaculation of woe; and in his memory the fa- 
mous games of Amyclae were celebrated, beginning 
about the time of the longest day, when the flowers 
are stricken by the sun and begin to fade — a festival 
marked, amid all its splendour, with some real mel- 
ancholy, and serious thought of the dead. In the 
midst of the "throne" of Bathycles, this sacred re- 
ceptacle, with the strange, half-humanised pillar 
above it, was to stand, probably in the open air, 
within a consecrated enclosure. Like the chest of 
Cypselus, the throne was decorated with reliefs of 
subjects taken from epic poetry, and it had support- 
ing figures. Unfortunately, what Pausanias tells us 
of this monument hardly enables one to present it to 
the imagination with any completeness or certainty; 
its dimensions he himself was unable exactly to ascer- 
tain, and he does not tell us its material. There are 
reasons, however, for supposing that it was of metal; 
and amid these ambiguities, the decorations of its 
base, the grave or altar-tomb of Hyacinth, shine out 
clearly, and are also, for the most part, clear in their 
significance. 



250 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

'^ There are wrought upon the altar figures, on the 
one side of Biris, on the other of Amphitrite and 
Poseidon. Near Zeus and Hermes, in speech with 
each other, stand Dionysus and Semele, and, beside 
her, Ino. Demeter, Kore, and Pluto are also wrought 
upon it, the Fates and the Seasons above them, and 
with them Aphrodite, Athene, and Artemis. They 
are conducting Hyacinthus to heaven, with Polyboea, 
the sister of Hyacinthus, who died, as is told, while 
yet a virgin. . . . Hercules also is figured on the 
tomb; he too carried to heaven by Athene and the 
other gods. The daughters of Thestius also are upon 
the altar, and the Seasons again, and the Muses. '^ 

It was as if many lines of solemn thought had been 
meant to unite, about the resting-place of this local 
Adonis, in imageries full of some dim promise of 
immortal life. 

But it was not so much in care for old idols as in 
the making of new ones that Greek art was at this 
time engaged. This whole first period of Greek art 
might, indeed, be called the period of graven images, 
and all its workmen sons of Daedalus; for Daedalus 
is the mythical, or all but mythical, representative of 
all those arts which are combined in the making of 
lovelier idols than had heretofore been seen. The 
old Greek word which is at the root of the name 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 251 

Daedalus, the name of a craft rather than a proper 
name, probably means to work curiously — all curi- 
ously beautiful wood-work is Daedal work; the main 
point about the curiously beautiful chamber in which 
Nausicaa sleeps, in the Odyssey, being that, like 
some exquisite Swiss chalet^ it is wrought in wood. 
But it came about that those workers in wood, whom 
Daedalus represents, the early craftsmen of Crete 
especially, were chiefly concerned with the making 
of religious images, like the carvers of Berchtesgaden 
and Oberammergau, the sort of daintily finished 
images of the objects of public or private devotion 
which such workmen would turn out. Wherever 
there was a wooden idol in any way fairer than 
others, finished, perhaps, sometimes, with colour and 
gilding, and appropriate real dress, there the hand 
of Daedalus had been. That such images were quite 
detached from pillar or wall, that they stood free, 
and were statues in the proper sense, showed that 
Greek art was already liberated from its earlier East- 
ern associations; such free-standing being apparently 
unknown in.. Assyrian art. And then, the effect of 
this Daedal skill in them was, that they came nearer 
to the proper form of humanity. It is the wonderful 
life-likeness of these early images which tradition 
celebrates in many anecdotes, showing a very early 



252 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

instinctive turn for, and delight in naturalism, in the 
Greek temper. As Cimabue, in his day, was able to 
charm men, almost as with illusion, by the simple 
device of half-closing the eyelids of his personages, 
and giving them, instead of round eyes, eyes that 
seemed to be in some degree sentient, and to feel the 
lights; so the marvellous progress in those Daedal 
wooden images was, that the eyes were open, so that 
they seemed to look, — the feet separated, so that 
they seemed to walk. Greek art is thus, almost from 
the first, essentially distinguished from the art of 
Egypt, by an energetic striving after truth in organic 
form. In representing the human figure, Egyptian 
art had held by mathematical or mechanical propor- 
tions exclusively. The Greek apprehends of it, as 
the main truth, that it is a living organism, with 
freedom of movement, and hence the infinite possi- 
bilities of motion, and of expression by motion, with 
which the imagination credits the higher sort of 
Greek sculpture; while the figures of Egyptian art, 
graceful as they often are, seem absolutely incapable 
of ^ny motion or gesture, other than the one actually 
designed. The work of the Greek sculptor, together 
with its more real anatomy, becomes full also of 
human soul. 

That old, primitive, mystical, first period of Greek 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 253 

religion, with its profound, though half-conscious, 
intuitions of spiritual powers in the natural world, 
attaching itself not to the worship of visible human 
forms, but to relics, to natural or half -natural objects 
— the roughly hewn tree, the unwrought stone, the 
pillar, the holy cone of Aphrodite in her dimly 
lighted cell at Paphos — had passed away. The 
second stage in the development of Greek religion 
had come; a period in which poet and artist were 
busily engaged in the work of incorporating all that 
might be retained of the vague divinations of that 
earlier visionary time, in definite and intelligible 
human image and human story. The vague belief, 
the mysterious custom and tradition, develope them- 
selves into an elaborately ordered ritual — into per- 
sonal gods, imaged in ivory and gold, sitting on 
beautiful thrones. Always, wherever a shrine or 
temple, great or small, is mentioned, there, we may 
conclude, was a visible idol, there was conceived to 
be the actual dwelling-place of a god. And this 
understanding became not less but more definite, as 
the temple became larger and more splendid, full of 
ceremony and servants, like the abode of an earthly 
king, and as the sacred presence itself assumed, little 
by little, the last beauties and refinements of the visi- 
ble human form and expression. 



254 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

In what we have seen of this first period of Greek 
art, in all its curious essays and inventions, we may 
observe this demand for beautiful idols increasing 
in Greece — for sacred images, at first still rude, and 
in some degree the holier for their rudeness, but 
which yet constitute the beginnings of the religious 
style, consummate in the work of Pheidias, uniting 
the veritable image of man in the full possession of 
his reasonable soul, with the true religious mysticity, 
the signature there of something from afar. One by 
one these new gods of bronze, or marble, or flesh- 
like ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous 
shrine, like the images of this period which Pausanias 
saw in the temple of Here at Olympia — the throned 
Seasons^ with Themis as the mother of the Seasons 
(divine rectitude being still blended, in men's fan- 
cies, with the unchanging physical order of things) 
and Fortune, and Victory "having wings, '* and Kore 
and Demeter and Dionysus, already visibly there, 
around the image of Here herself, seated on a throne; 
and all chryselephantine, all in gold and ivory. 
Novel as these things are, they still undergo consecra- 
tion at their first erecting. The figure of Athene, in 
her brazen temple at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, 
who makes also the image and the hymn, in triple 
service to the goddess; and again, that curious story 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 255 

of Dipoenus and Scyllis, brought back with so much 
awe to remove the public curse by completing their 
sacred task upon the images, show how simply relig- 
ious the age still was — that this wide-spread artistic 
activity was a religious enthusiasm also; those early 
sculptors have still, for their contemporaries, a divine 
mission, with some kind of hieratic or sacred quality 
in their gift, distinctly felt. 

The development of the artist, in the proper sense, 
out of the mere craftsman, effected in the first divis- 
ion of this period, is now complete; and, in close 
connexion with that busy graving of religious images, 
which occupies its second division, we come to some- 
thing like real personalities, to men with individual 
characteristics — such men as Ageladas of Argos, 
Gallon and Onatas of JEginsi, and Canachus of Sicyon. 
Mere fragment as our information concerning these 
early masters is at the best, it is at least unmistakea- 
bly information about men with personal differences 
of temper and talent, of their motives, of what we 
call s/y/e. We have come to a sort of art which is 
no longer broadly characteristic of a general period, 
one whose products we might have looked at without 
its occurring to us to ask concerning the artist, his 
antecedents, and his school. We have to do now 
with types of art, fully impressed with the subjec- 
tivity, the intimacies of the artist. 



256 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

Among these freer and stronger personalities 
emerging thus about the beginning of the fifth cen- 
tury before Christ — about the period of the Persian 
war — the name to which most of this sort of personal 
quality attaches, and which is therefore very interest- 
ing, is the name of Canachus of Sicyon, who seems 
to have comprehended in himself all the various 
attainments in art which had been gradually developed 
in the schools of his native city — carver in wood, 
sculptor, brass-cutter, and toreutes ; by toreutice be- 
ing meant the whole art of statuary in metals, and in 
their combination with other materials. At last we 
seem to see an actual person at work, and to some 
degree can follow, with natural curiosity, the motions 
of his spirit and his hand. We seem to discern in 
all we know of his productions the results of indi- 
vidual apprehension — the results, as well as the limi- 
tations, of an individual talent. 

It is impossible to date exactly the chief period of 
the activity of Canachus. That the great image of 
Apollo, which he made for the Milesians, was carried 
away to Ecbatana by the Persian army, is stated by 
Pausanias; but there is a doubt whether this was 
under Xerxes, as Pausanias says, in the year 479 B.C., 
or twenty years earlier, under Darius. So important 
a work as this colossal image of Apollo, for so great 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 257 

a shrine as the Didyfnceum, was probably the task 
of his maturity; and his career may, therefore, be 
regarded as having begun, at any rate, prior to the 
year 479 B.C., and the end of the Persian invasion 
the event which may be said to close this period of 
art. On the whole, the chief period of his activity 
is thought to have fallen earlier, and to have occu- 
pied the last forty years of the previous century; and 
he would thus have flourished, as we say, about fifty 
years before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of 
Fiesole fifty years before the manhood of Michel- 
angelo. 

His chief works were an Aphrodite, wrought for 
the Sicyonians in ivory and gold; that Apollo of 
bronze carried away by the Persians, and restored to 
its place about the year B.C. 350; and a reproduc- 
tion of the same work in cedar-wood, for the sanctu- 
ary of Apollo of the Ismenus, at Thebes. The primi- 
tive Greek worship, as we may trace it in Homer, 
presents already, on a minor scale, all the essential 
characteristics of the most elaborate Greek worship 
of after times — the sacred enclosure, the incense 
and other offerings, the prayer of the priest, the shrine 
itself — a small one, roofed in by the priest with 
green boughs, not unlike a wayside chapel in modern 
times, and understood to be the dwelling-place of 
s 



258 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

the divine person — within, almost certainly, an idol, 
with its own sacred apparel, a visible form, little 
more than symbolical perhaps, like the sacred pillar 
for which Bathycles made his throne at Amyclae, but, 
if an actual image, certainly a rude one. 

That primitive worship, traceable in almost all 
these particulars, even in the first book of the Iliad, 
had given place, before the time of Canachus at 
Sicyon, to a more elaborate ritual and a more com- 
pletely designed image-work; and a little bronze 
statue, discovered on the site of Tenea, where 
Apollo was the chief object of worship,^ the best 
representative of many similar marble figures — those 
of Thera and Orchomenus, for instance — is sup- 
posed to represent Apollo as this still early age con- 
ceived him — youthful, naked, muscular, and with 
the germ of the Greek profile, but formally smiling, 
and with a formal diadem or fillet, over the long 
hair which shows him to be no mortal athlete. The 
hands, like the feet, excellently modelled, are here 
extended downwards at the sides; but in some simi- 
lar .figures the hands are lifted, and held straight 
outwards, with the palms upturned. The Apollo of 
Canachus also had the hands thus raised, and on the 
open palm of the right hand was placed a stag, while 
1 Now preserved at Munich. 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 259 

with the left he grasped the bow. Pliny says that 
the stag was an auto??iafo?i, with a mechanical device 
for setting it in motion, a detail which hints, at least, 
at the subtlety of workmanship with which those 
ancient critics, who had opportunity of knowing, 
credited this early artist. Of this work itself noth- 
ing remains, but we possess perhaps some imitations 
of it. It is probably this most sacred possession of 
the place which the coins of Miletus display from 
various points of view, though, of course, only on 
the smallest scale. But a little bronze figure in the 
British Museum, with the stag in the right hand, and 
in the closed left hand the hollow where the bow has 
passed, is thought to have been derived from it; and 
its points of style are still further illustrated by a 
marble head of similar character, also preserved in 
the British Museum, which has many marks of having 
been copied in marble from an original in bronze. 
A really ancient work, or only archaic, it certainly 
expresses, together with all that careful patience and 
hardness of workmanship which is characteristic of 
an early age, a certain Apolline strength — a pride 
and dignity in the features, so steadily composed, 
below the stiff, archaic arrangement of the long, 
fillet-bound locks. It is the exact expression of that 
midway position, between an involved, archaic stiff- 



260 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

ness and the free play of individual talent, which is 
attributed to Canachus by the ancients. 

His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited a tem- 
ple near the gates of Thebes, on a rising ground, 
below which flowed the river Ismenus, had, accord- 
ing to Pausanias, so close a resemblance to that at 
Miletus that it required little skill in one who had 
seen either of them to tell what master had designed 
the other. Still, though of the same dimensions, 
while one was of cedar the other was of bronze — a 
reproduction one of the other we may believe, but 
with the modifications, according to the use of good 
workmen even so early as Canachus, due to the differ- 
ence of the material. For the likeness between the 
two statues, it is to be observed, is not the mechani- 
cal likeness of those earlier images represented by 
the statuette of Tenea, which spoke, not of the style 
of one master, but only of the manufacture of one 
workshop. In those two images of Canachus — the 
Milesian Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus — 
there were resemblances amid differences; resem- 
blances, as we may understand, in what was neverthe- 
less peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the 
precise conception of the god therein set forth; re- 
semblances which spoke directly of a single workman, 
though working freely, of one hand and one fancy, a 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 261 

likeness in that which could by no means be truly 
copied by another; it was the beginning of what we 
mean by the style of a master. Together with all the 
novelty, the innovating and improving skill, which 
has made Canachus remembered, an attractive, old- 
world, deeply-felt mysticity sCems still to cling about 
what we read of these early works. That piety, that 
religiousness of temper, of which the people of Sicyon 
had given proof so oddly in their dealings with those 
old carvers, Scyllis and Dipoenus, still survives in 
the master who was chosen to embody his own nov- 
elty of idea and execution in so sacred a place as 
the shrine of Apollo at Miletus. Something still 
conventional, combined, in these images, with the 
effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable beauty 
and power, seems to have given them a really impos- 
ing religious character. Escaping from the rigid 
uniformities of the stricter archaic style, he is still 
obedient to certain hieratic influences and tradi- 
tions; he is still reserved, self-controlled, composed 
or even mannered a little, as in some sacred presence, 
with the severity and strength of the early style. 

But there are certain notices which seem to show 
that he had his purely poetical motives also, as be- 
fitted his age; motives which prompted works of 
mere fancy, like his Muse with the Lyre, symbolis- 



262 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

ing the chromatic style of music ; x\ristocles his 
brother, and Ageladas of Argos executing each an- 
other statue to symbolise the two other orders of 
music. The Riding Boys, of which Pliny speaks, 
like the mechanical stag on the hand of Apollo, 
which he also describes, were perhaps mechanical 
toys, as Benvenuto Cellini made toys. In the Beard- 
less ^sculapius, again — the image of the god of 
healing, not merely as the son of Apollo, but as 
one ever young — it is the Poetry of sculpture that 
we see. 

This poetic feeling, and the piety of temper so 
deeply impressed upon his images of Apollo, seem 
to have been combined in his chryselephantine 
Aphrodite, as we see it very distinctly in Pausanias, 
enthroned with an apple in one hand and a poppy in 
the other, and with the sphere, or polos, about the 
head, in its quaint little temple or chapel at Sicyon, 
with the hierokepis, or holy garden, about it. This is 
what Canachus has to give us instead of the strange, 
symbolical cone, with the lights burning around it, 
in its dark cell — the form under which Aphrodite 
was worshipped at her famous shrine of Paphos. 

"A woman to keep it fair," Pausanias tells us, 
"who may go in to no man, and a virgin called the 
water-bearer, who holds her priesthood for a year, 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 263 

are alone permitted to enter the sacred place* All 
others may gaze upon the goddess and offer their 
prayers from the doorway. The seated image is the 
work of Canachus of Sicyon. It is wrought in ivory 
and gold, bearing a sphere on the head, and having 
in the one hand a poppy and in the other an apple. 
They offer to her the thighs of all victims excepting 
swine, burning them upon sticks of juniper, together 
with leaves of lad's-love, a herb found in the enclos- 
ure without, and nowhere else in the world. Its 
leaves are smaller than those of the beech and larger 
than the ilex; in form they are like an oak-leaf, and 
in colour resemble most the leaves of the poplar, one 
side dusky, the other white." 

That is a place one would certainly have liked to 
see. So real it seems ! — the seated image, the peo- 
ple gazing through the doorway, the fragrant odour. 
Must it not still be in secret keeping somewhere ? — 
we are almost tempted to ask; maintained by some 
few solitary worshippers, surviving from age to age, 
among the villagers of Achaia. 

In spite of many obscurities, it may be said that 
what we know, and what we do not know, of Cana- 
chus illustrates the amount and sort of knowledge we 
possess about the artists of the period which he best 
represents. A naivete — a freshness, an early-aged 



264 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE 

simplicity and sincerity — that, we may believe, had 
we their works before us, would be for us their chief 
aesthetic charm. Cicero remarked that, in contrast 
with the works of the next generation of sculptors, 
there was a stiffness in the statues of Canachus which 
made them seem untrue to nature — " Canachi signa 
rigidiora esse quam ut imitentur veritatem." But 
Cicero belongs to an age surfeited with artistic li- 
cence, and likely enough to undervalue the severity 
of the early masters, the great motive struggling still 
with the minute and rigid hand. So the critics of 
the last century ignored, or underrated, the works of 
the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls 
"rigidity" of Canachus, combined with w^hat we 
seem to see of his poetry of conception, his fresh- 
ness, his solemnity, we may understand no really 
repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of 
labour, the expression of which is constant in all the 
best work of an early time, in the David of Ver- 
rocchio, for instance, and in the early Flemish paint- 
ers, as it is natural and becoming in youth itself. 
The^ very touch of the struggling hand was upon the 
work; but with the interest, the half -repressed ani- 
mation of a great promise, fulfilled, as we now see, 
in the magnificent growth of Greek sculpture in the 
succeeding age; which, however, for those earlier 



THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 265 

workmen, meant the loins girt and the half-folded 
wings not yet quite at home in the air, with a gravity, 
a discretion and reserve, the charm of which, if felt 
in quiet, is hardly less than that of the wealth and 
fulness of final mastery. 



THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 



I HAVE dwelt the more emphatically upon the 
purely sensuous aspects of early Greek art, on the 
beauty and charm of its mere material and workman- 
ship, the grace of hand in it, its chryselephantine char- 
acter, because the direction of all the more general 
criticism since Lessing has been, somewhat one- 
sidedly, towards the ideal or abstract element in 
Greek art, towards what we may call its philosophi- 
cal aspect. And, indeed, this philosophical element, 
a tendency to the realisation of a certain inward, 
abstract, intellectual ideal, is also at work in Greek 
art — a tendency which, if that chryselephantine in- 
fluence is called Ionian, may rightly be called the 
Dofian, or, in reference to its broader scope, the 
European influence; and this European influence or 
tendency is really towards the impression of an order, 
a sanity, a proportion in all work, which shall reflect 
the inward order of human reason, now fully con- 

266 



THE xMARBLES OF ^GINA 267 

scious of itself, — towards a sort of art in which the 
record and delineation of humanity, as active in the 
wide, inward world of its passion and thought, has 
become more or less definitely the aim of all artistic 
handicraft. 

In undergoing the action of these two opposing 
influences, and by harmonising in itself their antag- 
onism, Greek sculpture does but reflect the larger 
movements of more general Greek history. All 
through Greek history we may trace, in every sphere 
of the activity of the Greek mind, the action of these 
two opposing tendencies, — the centrifugal and cen- 
tripetal tendencies, as we may perhaps not too fanci- 
fully call them. There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, 
the Asiatic tendency, flying from the centre, working 
with little forethought straight before it, in the devel- 
opment of every thought and fancy; throwing itself 
forth in endless play of undirected imagination; de- 
lighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful mate- 
rial, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in 
philosophy, even in architecture and its subordinate 
crafts. In the social and political order it rejoices 
in the freest action of local and personal influences; 
its restless versatility drives it towards the assertion 
of the principles of separatism, of individualism, — 
the separation of state from state, the maintenance 



268 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

of local religions, the development of the individual 
in that which is most peculiar and individual in 
him. Its claim is in its grace, its freedom and hap- 
piness, its lively interest, the variety of its gifts to 
civilisation; its weakness is self-evident, and was 
what made the unity of Greece impossible. It is 
this centrifugal tendency which Plato is desirous to 
cure, by maintaining, over against it, the Dorian 
influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in 
society, in culture, in the very physical nature of 
man. An enemy everywhere to Variegation, to what 
is cunning or "myriad-minded," he sets himself, 
in mythology, in music, in poetry, in every kind of 
art, to enforce the ideal of a sort of Parmenidean 
abstractness and calm. 

This exaggerated ideal of Plato's is, however, only 
the exaggeration of that salutary European tendency, 
which, finding human mind the most absolutely real 
and precious thing in the world, enforces everywhere 
the impress of its sanity, its profound reflexi.ons upon 
things as they really are, its sense of proportion. It 
is the centripetal tendency, which links individuals 
to each other, states to states, one period of organic 
growth to another, under the reign of a composed, 
rational, self-conscious order, in the universal light 
of the understanding. 



THE MARBLES OF .^GINA 269 

Whether or not this temper, so clearly traceable as 
a distinct influence in the course of Greek develop- 
ment, was indeed the peculiar gift of the Dorian 
race, certainly that race is the best illustration of it, 
in its love of order, of that severe composition every- 
where, of which the Dorian style of architecture is, 
as it were, a material symboi — in its constant aspi- 
ration after what is earnest and dignified, as exempli- 
fied most evidently in the religion of its predilection, 
the religion of Apollo. 

For as that Ionian influence, the chryselephantine 
influence, had its patron in Hephaestus, belonged to 
the religion of Hephaestus, husband of Aphrodite, the 
representation of exquisite workmanship, of fine art 
in metal, coming from the East in close connexion 
with the artificial furtherance, through dress and 
personal ornament, of the beauty of the body; so 
that Dorian or European influence embodied itself 
in the religion of Apollo. For the development of 
this or that mythological conception, from its root 
in fact or law of the physical world, is very various 
in its course. Thus, Demeter, the spirit of life in 
grass, — and Dionysus, the "spiritual form " of life in 
the green sap, — remain, to the end of men's thoughts 
and fancies about them, almost wholly physical. 
But Apollo, the "spiritual form" of sunbeams, early 



270 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

r 

becomes (the merely physical element in his consti- 
tution being almost wholly suppressed) exclusively 
ethical, — the " spiritual form " of inward or intellect- 
ual light, in all its manifestations. He represents all 
those specially European ideas, of a reasonable, per- 
sonal freedom, as understood in Greece; of a rea- 
sonable polity; of the sanity of soul and body, through 
the cure of disease and of the sense of sin; of the 
perfecting of both by reasonable exercise or ascesis ; 
his religion is a sort of embodied equity, its aim the 
realisation of fair reason and just consideration of 
the truth of things everywhere. 

I cannot dwell on the general aspects of this sub- 
ject further, but I would remark that in art also the 
religion of Apollo was a sanction of, and an encour- 
agement towards the true valuation of humanity, in 
its sanity, its proportion, its knowledge of itself. 
Following after this, Greek art attained, in its repro- 
ductions of human form, not merely to the profound 
expression of the highest indwelling spirit of human 
intelligence, but to the expression also of the great 
human passions, of the powerful movements as well 
as of the calm and peaceful order of the soul, as find- 
ing in the affections of the body a language, the 
elements of which the artist might analyse, and then 
combine, order, and recompose. In relation to 



THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 271 

miksic, to art, to all those matters over which the 
Muses preside, Apollo, as distinct from Hermes, 
seems to be the representative and patron of what I 
may call reasonable music, of a great intelligence at 
work in art, of beauty attained through the conscious 
realisation of ideas. They were the cities of the 
Dorian affinity which early brought to perfection that 
most characteristic of Greek institutions, the sacred 
dance, with the whole gymnastic system which was 
its natural accompaniment. And it was the familiar 
spectacle of that living sculpture which developed, 
perhaps, beyond everything else in the Greek mind, 
at its best, a sense of the beauty and significance of 
the human form. 

Into that bewildered, dazzling world of minute and 
dainty handicraft — the chamber of Paris, the house 
of Alcinous — in which the form of man alone had 
no adequate place, and as yet, properly, was not, this 
Dorian, European, Apolline influence introduced the 
intelligent and spiritual human presence, and gave 
it its true value, a value consistently maintained to 
the end of Greek art, by a steady hold upon and pre- 
occupation with the inward harmony and system of 
human personality. 

In the works of the Asiatic tradition — the marbles 
of Nineveh, for instance — and, so far as we can see. 



272 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

in the early Greek art, which derives from it, as, for 
example, in the archaic remains from Cyprus, the 
form of man is inadequate, and below the measure 
of perfection attained there in the representation of 
the lower forms of life; just as in the little reflective 
art of Japan, so lovely in its reproduction of flower 
or bird, the human form alone comes almost as a 
caricature, or is at least untouched by any higher 
ideal. To that Asiatic tradition, then, with its per- 
fect craftsmanship, its consummate skill in design, 
its power of hand, the Dorian, the European, the 
true Hellenic influence brought a revelation of the 
soul and body of man. 

And we come at last in the marbles of ^gina to 
a monument, which bears upon it the full expres- 
sion of this humanism, — to a work, in which the 
presence of man, realised with complete mastery 
of hand, and with clear apprehension of how he 
actually is and moves and looks, is touched with the 
freshest sense of that new-found, inward value; the 
energy of worthy passions purifying, the light of his 
re.ason shining through, bodily forms and motions, 
solemnised, attractive, pathetic. We have reached 
an extant work, real and visible, of an importance 
out of all proportion to anything actually remaining 
of earlier art, and justifying, by its direct interest and 



THE MARBLES OF /EGINA 273 

charm, our long prelude on the beginnings of Greek 
sculpture, while there was still almost nothing actu- 
ally to see. 

These fifteen figures of Parian marble, of about 
two-thirds the size of life, forming, with some defi- 
ciencies, the east and west gables of a temple of 
Athene, the ruins of which still stand on a hill-side 
by the sea-shore, in a remote part of the island of 
^^gina, were discovered in the year 1811, and hav- 
ing been purchased by the Crown Prince, afterwards 
King Louis I., of Bavaria, are now the great orna- 
ment of the Gfyptothek, or Museum of Sculpture, at 
Munich. The group in each gable consisted of 
eleven figures; and of the fifteen larger figures dis- 
covered, five belong to the eastern, ten to the western 
gable, so* that the western gable is complete with the 
exception of one figure, which should stand in the 
place to which, as the groups are arranged at Munich, 
the beautiful figure, bending down towards the fallen 
leader, has been actually transferred from the eastern 
gable; certain fragments showing that the lost figure 
corresponded essentially to this, which has therefore 
been removed hither from its place in the less com- 
plete group to which it properly belongs. For there 
are two legitimate views or motives in the restora- 
tion of ancient sculpture, the antiquarian and the 

T 



274 THE MARBLES OF .^GINA 

aesthetic, as they may be termed, respectively; the 
former limiting itself to the bare presentation of what 
actually remains of the ancient work, braving all 
shock to living eyes from the mutilated nose or chin; 
while the latter, the aesthetic method, requires that, 
with the least possible addition or interference, by 
the most skilful living hand procurable, the object 
shall be made to please, or at least content the living 
eye, seeking enjoyment and not a bare fact of science, 
in the spectacle of ancient art. This latter way of 
restoration, — the aesthetic way, — followed by the 
famous connoisseurs of the Renaissance, has been 
followed here; and the visitor to Munich actually sees 
the marbles of ^gina, as restored after a model by 
the tasteful hand of Thorwaldsen. 

Different views have, however, been maintained as 
to the right grouping of the figures; but the compo- 
sition of the two groups was apparently similar, not 
only in general character but in a certain degree of 
correspondence of all the figures, each to each. And 
in both the subject is a combat, — a combat between 
Greeks and Asiatics concerning the body of a Greek 
hero, fallen among the foemen, — an incident so 
characteristic of the poetry of the heroic wars. In 
both cases, Athene, whose temple this sculpture was 
designed to decorate^ intervenes, her image being 



THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 275 

complete in the western gable, the head and some 
other fragments remaining of that in the eastern. 
The incidents represented were probably chosen with 
reference to the traditions of ^Egina in connexion 
with the Trojan war. Greek legend is ever deeply 
coloured by local interest and sentiment, and this 
monument probably celebrates Telamon, and Ajax 
his son, the heroes who established the fame of 
^gina, and whom the united Greeks, on the morn- 
ing of the battle of Salamis, in which the ^ginetans 
were distinguished above all other Greeks in bravery, 
invited as their peculiar, spiritual allies from that 
island. 

Accordingly, antiquarians are, for the most part, 
of opinion that the eastern gable represents the com- 
bat of Hercules (Hercules being the only figure among 
the warriors certainly to be identified), and of his 
comrade Telamon, against Laomedon of Troy, in 
which, properly, Hercules was leader, but here, as 
squire and archer, is made to give the first place to 
Telamon, as the titular hero of the place. Opinion 
is not so definite regarding the subject of the western 
gable, which, however, probably represents the com- 
bat between the Greeks and Trojans over the body of 
Patroclus. In both cases an ^ginetan hero, in the 
eastern gable Telamon, in the western his son Ajax, 



276 THE MARBLES OF yEGINA 

is represented in the extreme crisis of battle, such a 
crisis as, according to the deep religiousness of the 
Greeks of that age, was a motive for the visible inter- 
vention of the goddess in favour of her chosen 
people. 

Opinion as to the date of the work, based mainly 
on the characteristics of the work itself, has varied 
within a period ranging from the middle of the six- 
tieth to the middle of the seventieth Olympiad, in- 
clining on the whole to the later date, in the period 
of the Ionian revolt against Persia, and a few years 
earlier than the battle of Marathon. 

In this monument, then, we have a revelation in 
the sphere of art, of the temper which made the 
victories of Marathon and Salamis possible, of the 
true spirit of Greek chivalry as displayed in the Per- 
sian war, and in the highly ideal conception of its 
events, expressed in Herodotus and approving itself 
minutely to the minds of the Greeks, as a series of 
affairs in which the gods and heroes of old time 
personally intervened, and that not as mere shadows. 
It was natural that the high-pitched temper, the stress 
of thought and feeling, which ended in the final con- 
flict of Greek liberty with Asiatic barbarism, should 
stimulate quite a new interest in the poetic legends 
of the earlier conflict between them in the heroic 



THE MARBLES OF /EGINA 277 

age. As the events of the Crusades and the chival- 
rous spirit of that period, leading men's minds back 
to ponder over the deeds of Charlemagne and his 
paladins, gave birth to the composition of the Song 
of Roland, just so this ^ginetan sculpture displays 
the Greeks of a later age feeding their enthusiasm 
on the legend of a distant past, and is a link between 
Herodotus and Homer. In those ideal figures, pen- 
sive a little from the first, we may suppose, with the 
shadowiness of a past age, we may yet see how Greeks 
of the time of Themistocles really conceived of 
Homeric knight and squire. 

Some other fragments of art, also discovered in 
^gina, and supposed to be contemporary with the 
temple of Athene, tend, by their roughness and im- 
maturity, to show that this small building, so united 
in its effect, so complete in its simplicity, in the 
symmetry of its two main groups of sculpture, was 
the perfect artistic flower of its time and place. Yet 
within the limits of this simple unity, so important 
an element in the charm and impressiveness of the 
place, a certain inequality of design and execution 
may be detected; the hand of a slightly earlier 
master, probably, having worked in the western 
gable, while the master of the eastern gable has gone 
some steps farther than he in fineness and power of 



278 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

expression; the stooping figure of the supposed 
Ajax, — belonging to the western group in the present 
arrangement, but really borrowed, as I said, from the 
eastern, — which has in it something above the type 
of the figures grouped round it, being this later sculp- 
tor's work. Yet Overbeck, who has elaborated the 
points of this distinction of styles, commends with- 
out reserve the technical excellence of the whole 
work, executed, as he says, 'Svith an application of 
all known instruments of sculpture; the delicate cal- 
culation of weight in the composition of the several 
parts, allowing the artist to dispense with all artificial 
supports, and to set his figures, with all their complex 
motions, and yet with plinths only three inches thick, 
into the basis of the gable; the bold use of the chisel, 
which wrought the shield, on the freely-held arm, 
down to a thickness of scarcely three inches; the 
fineness of the execution, even in parts of the work 
invisible to an ordinary spectator, in the diligent 
finishing of which the only motive of the artist was 
to satisfy his own conviction as to the nature of 
good sculpture." 

It was the Dorian cities, Plato tells us, which first 
shook off the false Asiatic shame, and stripped off 
their clothing for purposes of exercise and training 
in the gymnasium ; and it was part of the Dorian or 



THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 279 

European influence to assert the value in art of the 
unveiled and healthy human form. And here the 
artists of ^gina, notwithstanding Homer's descrip- 
tion of Greek armour, glowing like the sun itself, have 
displayed the Greek warriors — Greek and Trojan 
alike — not in the equipments they would really 
have worn, but naked, — flesh fairer than that golden 
armour, though more subdued and tranquil in effect 
on the spectator, the undraped form of man coming 
like an embodiment of the Hellenic spirit, and as 
an element of te^fiperance^ into the somewhat gaudy 
spectacle of Asiatic, or archaic art. Paris alone 
bears his dainty trappings, characteristically, — a 
coat of golden scale-work, the scales set on a lining 
of canvas or leather, shifting deftly over the delicate 
body beneath, and represented on the gable by the 
gilding, or perhaps by real gilt metal. 

It was characteristic also of that more truly Hel- 
lenic art — another element of its temperance — to 
adopt the use of marble in its works; and the ma- 
terial of these figures is the white marble of Paros. 
Traces of colour have, however, been found on cer- 
tain parts of them. The outer surfaces of the shields 
and helmets have been blue; their inner parts and 
the crests of the helmets, red; the hem of the drapery 
of Athene, the edges of her sandals, the plinths on 



280 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

which the figures stand, also red; one quiver red, 
another blue; the eyes and lips, too, coloured; per- 
haps, the hair. There was just a limited and conven- 
tionalised use of colour, in effect, upon the marble. 

And although the actual material of these figures 
is marble, its coolness and massiveness suiting the 
growing severity of Greek thought, yet they have their 
reminiscences of work in bronze, in a certain slim- 
ness and tenuity, a certain dainty lightness of poise 
in their grouping, which remains in the memory as a 
peculiar note of their style; the possibility of such 
easy and graceful balancing being one of the privi- 
leges or opportunities of statuary in cast metal, of 
that hollow casting in which the whole weight of the 
work is so much less than that of a work of equal 
size in marble, and which permits so much wider and 
freer a disposition of the parts about its centre of 
gravity. In JEgina, the tradition of metal work seems 
to have been strong, and Onatas, whose name is 
closely connected with ^gina, and who is contem- 
porary with the presumably later portion of this mon- 
ument, was above all a worker in bronze. Here 
again, in this lurking spirit of metal work, we have 
a new element of complexity in the character of these 
precious remains. And then, to compass the whole 
work in our imagination, we must conceive yet an- 



THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 281 

other element in the conjoint effect ; metal being 
actually mingled with the marble, brought thus to its 
daintiest point of refinement, as the little holes indi- 
cate, bored into the marble figures for the attachment 
of certain accessories in bronze, — lances, swords, 
bows, the Medusa' s head on the cegis of Athene, and 
its fringe of little snakes. 

And as there was no adequate consciousness and 
recognition of the essentials of man's nature in the 
older, oriental art, so there is no pathos, no htmian- 
ity in the more special sense, but a kind of hardness 
and cruelty rather, in those oft-repeated, long, matter- 
of-fact processions, on the marbles of Nineveh, of 
slave-like soldiers on their way to battle mechani- 
cally, or of captives on their way to slavery or death, 
for the satisfaction of the Great King. These Greek 
marbles, on the contrary, with that figure yearning 
forward so graciously to the fallen leader, are deeply 
impressed with a natural pathetic effect — the true 
reflexion again of the temper of Homer in speaking 
of war. Ares, the god of war himself, we must re- 
member, is, according to his original import, the god 
of storms, of winter raging among the forests of the 
Thracian mountains, a brother of the north wind. 
It is only afterwards that, surviving many minor gods 
of war, he becomes a leader of hosts, a sort of divine 



282 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

knight and patron of knighthood; and, through the 
old intricate connexion of love and war, and that 
amorousness which is the universally conceded privi- 
lege of the soldier's life, he comes to be very near 
Aphrodite, — the paramour of the goddess of physical 
beauty. So that the idea of a sort of soft dalliance 
mingles, in his character, so unlike that of the Chris- 
tian leader. Saint George, with the idea of savage, 
warlike impulses ; the fair, soft creature suddenly 
raging like a storm, to which, in its various wild 
incidents, war is constantly likened in Homer; the 
effects of delicate youth and of tempest blending, in 
Ares, into one expression, not without that cruelty 
which mingles also, like the influence of some malign 
fate upon him, with the finer characteristics of 
Achilles, who is a kind of merely human double of 
Ares. And in Homer's impressions of war the same 
elements are blent, — the delicacy, the beauty of 
youth, especially, which makes it so fit for purposes 
of love, spoiled and wasted by the random flood and 
Are of a violent tempest; the glittering beauty of the 
Greek "war-men," expressed in so many brilliant 
figures, and the splendour of their equipments, in 
collision with the miserable accidents of battle, and 
the grotesque indignities of death in it, brought home 
to our fancy by a hundred pathetic incidents, — the 



THE MARBLES OF .EGINA 283 

sword hot with slaughter, the stifling blood in the 
throat, the spoiling of the body in every member 
severally. He thinks of, and records, at his early 
ending, the distant home from which the boy came, 
who goes stumbling now, just stricken so wretchedly, 
his bowels in his hands. He pushes the expression 
of this contrast to the rnacabre even, suggesting the 
approach of those lower forms of life which await 
to-morrow the fair bodies of the heroes, who strive and 
fall to-day like these in the ^ginetan gables. For 
it is just that twofold sentiment which this sculpture 
has embodied. The seemingly stronger hand which 
wrought the eastern gable has shown itself strongest 
in the rigid expression of the truth of pain, in the 
mouth of the famous recumbent figure on the extreme 
left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard- 
shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, these figures all 
smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies ot 
the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be 
but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still 
somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of 
Homer's conventional epithet ^^ tender," when he 
speaks of the flesh of his heroes. 

And together with this touching power there is also 
in this work the effect of an early simplicity, the 
charm of its limitations. For as art which has passed 



284 THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 

its prime has sometimes the charm of an absolute 
refinement in taste and workmanship, so immature 
art also, as we now see, has its own attractiveness in 
the naivete, the freshness of spirit, which finds 
power and interest in simple motives of feeling, and 
in the freshness of hand, which has a sense of enjoy- 
ment in mechanical processes still performed unme- 
chanically, in the spending of care and intelligence 
on every touch. As regards Italian art, the sculpture 
and paintings of the earlier Renaissance, the aesthetic 
value of this naivete is now well understood; but it 
has its value in Greek sculpture also. There, too, 
is a succession of phases through which the artistic 
power and purpose grew to maturity, with the endur- 
ing charm of an unconventional, unsophisticated 
freshness, in that very early stage of it illustrated by 
these marbles of ^gina, not less than in the work of 
Verrocchio and Mino of Fiesole. Effects of this we 
may note in that sculpture of ^gina, not merely in 
the simplicity, or monotony even, of the whole com- 
position, and in the exact and formal correspondence 
of one gable to the other, but in the simple readiness 
with which the designer makes the two second spear- 
men kneel, against the probability of the thing, so 
as just to fill the space he has to compose in. The 
profiles are still not yet of the fully developed Greek 



THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 285 

type, but have a somewhat sharp prominence of nose 
and chin, as in Etrurian design, in the early sculpture 
of Cyprus, and in the earlier Greek vases; and the 
general proportions of the body in relation to the 
shoulders are still somewhat archaically slim. But 
then the workman is at work in dry earnestness, with 
a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness 
verging on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish 
painter; he communicates to us his still youthful 
sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudi- 
mentary difficulties of his art overcome. And withal, 
these figures have in them a true expression of life, 
of animation. In this monument of Greek chivalry, 
pensive and visionary as it may seem, those old 
Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer 
or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with 
a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the 
^ginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of 
Greek sculpture. 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC 
PRIZEMEN 



A CHAPTER IN GREEK ART 

It is pleasant when, looking at medieval sculpture, 
we are reminded of that of Greece; pleasant like- 
wise, conversely, in the study of Greek work to be 
put on thoughts of the Middle Age. To the refined 
intelligence, it would seem, there is something attrac- 
tive in complex expression as such. The Marbles 
of ^gtna, then, may remind us of the Middle Age 
where it passes into the early Renaissance, of its 
most tenderly finished warrior-tombs at Westminster 
or in Florence. A less mature phase of medieval art 
is recalled to our fancy by a primitive Greek work in 
the Museum of Athens, Hermes, bearing a ram, a 
little one, upon his shoulders. He bears it thus, 
had borne it round the walls of Tanagra, as its citi- 
zens told, by way of purifying that place from the 

286 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 287 

plague, and brings to mind, of course, later images 
of the "Good Shepherd." It is not the subject of 
the work, however, but its style, that sets us down in 
thought before some gothic cathedral front. Suppose 
the He7nnes Kriopho7'iis lifted into one of those empty 
niches, and the archaeologist will inform you rightly, 
as at Auxerre or Wells, of Italian influence, perhaps 
of Italian workmen, and along with them indirect old 
Greek influence coming northwards; while the con- 
noisseur assures us that all good art, at its respective 
stages of development, is in essential qualities every- 
where alike. It is observed, as a note of imperfect 
skill, that in that carved block of stone the animal 
is insufficiently detached from the shoulders of its 
bearer. Again, how precisely gothic is the effect! 
Its very limitation as sculpture emphasises the func- 
tion of the. thing as an architectural ornament. And 
the student of the Middle Age, if it came within his 
range, would be right in so esteeming it. Hieratic, 
stiff and formal, if you will, there is a knowledge of 
the human body in it nevertheless, of the body, and 
of the purely animal soul therein, full of the promise 
of what is coming in that chapter of Greek art which 
may properly be entitled, ''^The Age of Athletic 
Prizemen." 

That rude image, a work perhaps of Calamis of 



288 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

shadowy fame, belongs to a phase of art still in grave- 
clothes or swaddling-bands, still strictly subordinate 
to religious or other purposes not immediately its 
own. It had scarcely to wait for the next genera- 
tion to be superseded, and we need not wonder that 
but little of it remains. But that it was a widely 
active phase of art, with all the vigour of local varie- 
ties, is attested by another famous archaic monument, 
too full of a kind of sacred poetry to be passed by. 
The reader does not need to be reminded that the 
Greeks, vivid as was their consciousness of this life, 
cared much always for the graves of the dead; that 
to be cared for, to be honoured, in one's grave, to 
have Tvfx/So^ d/x<^t7roA.os, a frequented tomb, as Pindar 
says, was a considerable motive with them, even 
among the young. In the study of its funeral monu- 
ments we might indeed follow closely enough the 
general development of art in Greece from beginning 
to end. The carved slab of the ancient shepherd of 
Orchomenus, with his dog and rustic staff, the stele 
of the ancient man-at-arms signed " xAristocles, " rich 
originally with colour and gold and fittings of bronze, 
are among the few still visible pictures, or portraits, 
it maybe, of the earliest Greek life. Compare them, 
compare their expression, for a moment, with the 
deeply incised tombstones of the Brethren of St. 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 289 

Francis and their clients, which still roughen the 
pavement of Santa Croce at Florence, and recall the 
varnished polychrome decoration of those Greek 
monuments in connexion with the worn-out blazonry 
of the funeral brasses of England and Flanders. The 
Shepherd, the Hoplite, begin a series continuous to 
the era of full Attic mastery in its gentlest mood, 
with a large and varied store of memorials of the 
dead, which, not so strangely as it may seem at first 
sight, are like selected pages from daily domestic 
life. See, for instance, at the British Museum, 
Trypho, "the son of Eutychus," one of the very 
pleasantest human likenesses there, though it came 
from a cemetery — a son it was hard to leave in it 
at nineteen or twenty. With all the suppleness, the 
delicate muscularity, of the flower of his youth, his 
handsome face sweetened by a kind and simple heart, 
in motion, surely, he steps forth from some shadowy 
chamber, strigil in hand, as of old, and with his 
coarse towel or cloak of monumental drapery ov^er 
one shoulder. But whither precisely, you may ask, 
and as what, is he moving there in the doorway? 
Well! in effect, certainly, it is the memory of the 
dead lad, emerging thus from his tomb, — the still 
active soul, or permanent thought, of him, as he most 
liked to be. 



290 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

The Harpy Tomb, so called from its mysterious 
winged creatures with human faces, carrying the little 
shrouded souls of the dead, is a work many genera- 
tions earlier than that graceful monument of Trypho. 
It was from an ancient cemetery at Xanthus in Lycia 
that it came to the British Museum. The Lycians 
were not a Greek people; but, as happened even 
with "barbarians" dwelling on the coast of Asia 
Minor, they became lovers of the Hellenic culture, 
and Xanthus, their capital, as may be judged from 
the beauty of its ruins, managed to have a considera- 
ble portion in Greek art, though infusing it with a 
certain Asiatic colour. The frugally designed frieze 
of the Harpy Tomb, in the lowest possible relief, 
might fairly be placed between the monuments of 
Assyria and those primitive Greek works among 
which it now actually stands. The stiffly ranged 
figures in any other than strictly archaic work would 
seem affected. But what an undercurrent of refined 
sentiment, presumably not Asiatic, not "barbaric," 
lifting those who felt thus about death so early into 
the main stream of Greek humanity, and to a level 
of visible refinement in execution duly expressive 
of it! 

In that old burial-place of Xanthus, then, a now 
nameless family, or a single bereaved member of it. 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 291 

represented there as a diminutive figure crouching 
on the earth in sorrow, erected this monument, so 
full of family sentiment, and of so much value as 
illustrating what is for us a somewhat empty period 
in the history of Greek art, strictly so called. Like 
the less conspicuously adorned tombs around it, like 
the tombs in Homer, it had the form of a tower — a 
square tower about twenty-four feet high, hollowed 
at the top into a small chamber, for the reception, 
through a little doorway, of the urned ashes of the 
dead. Four sculptured slabs were placed at this 
level on the four sides of the tower in the manner 
of a frieze. I said that the winged creatures with 
human faces carry the little souls of the dead. The 
interpretation of these mystic imageries is, in truth, 
debated. But in face of them, and remembering 
how the sculptors and glass-painters of the Middle 
Age constantly represented the souls of the dead as 
tiny bodies, one can hardly doubt as to the meaning 
of these particular details which, repeated on every 
side, seem to give the key-note of the whole compo- 
sition.^ Those infernal, or celestial, birds, indeed, 

1 In some fine reliefs of the thirteenth century, Jesus himself 
draws near to the deathbed of his Mother. The soul has already 
quitted her body, and is seated, a tiny crowned figure, on his left 
arm (as she had carried Him) to be taken to heaven. In the 
beautiful early fourteenth century monument of Aymer de Valence 



292 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

are not true to what is understood to be the harpy 
form. Call them sirens, rather. People, and not 
only old people, as you know, appear sometimes to 
have been quite charmed away by what dismays most 
of us. The tiny shrouded figures which the sirens 
carry are carried very tenderly, and seem to yearn in 
their turn towards those kindly nurses as they pass on 
their way to a new world. Their small stature, as I 
said, does not prove them infants, but only new-born 
into that other life, and contrasts their helplessness 
with the powers, the great presences, now around 
them. A cow, far enough from Myron's famous 
illusive animal, suckles her calf. She is one of 
almost any number of artistic symbols of new-birth, 
of the renewal of life, drawn from a world which is, 
after all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned, 
as some have thought, the Goddess of Death; on the 
opposite side the Goddess of Life, with her flowers 
and fruit. Towards her three young maidens are 
advancing — were they still alive thus, graceful, vir- 

at Westminster, the soul of the deceased, " a small figure wrapped 
in a mantle," is supported by two angels at the head of the tomb. 
Among many similar instances may be mentioned the soul of the 
beggar, Lazarus, on a carved capital at Vezelay; and the same 
subject in a coloured window at Bourges. The clean, white little 
creature seems glad to escape from the body, tattooed all over with 
its sores in a regular pattern. 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 293 

ginal, with their long, plaited hair, and long, deli- 
cately-folded tunics, looking forward to carry on 
their race into the future? Presented severally, on 
the other sides of the dark hollow within, three male 
persons — a young man, an old man, and a boy — 
seem to be bringing home, somewhat wearily, to their 
"long home," the young man, his armour, the boy, 
and the old man, like old Socrates, the mortuary 
cock, as they approach some shadowy, ancient deity 
of the tomb, or it may be the throned impersonation 
of their "fathers of old." The marble surface was 
coloured, at least in part, with fixtures of metal here 
and there. The designer, whoever he may have 
been, was possessed certainly of some tranquillising 
second thoughts concerning death, which may well 
have had their value for mourners; and he has ex- 
pressed those thoughts, if lispingly, yet with no faults 
of commission, with a befitting grace, and, in truth, 
at some points, with something already of a really 
Hellenic definition and vigour. He really speaks 
to us in his work, through his symbolic and imitative 
figures, — speaks to our intelligence persuasively. 

The surviving thought of the lad Trypho, returning 
from his tomb to the living, was of athletic character; 
how he was and looked when in the flower of his 
strength. And it is not of the dead but of the living. 



294 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

who look and are as he, that the artistic genius of 
this period is full. It is a period, truly, not of bat- 
tles, such as those commemorated in the Marbles of 
^gina, but of more peaceful contests — at Olympia, 
at the Isthmus, at Delphi — the glories of which Pin- 
dar sang in language suggestive of a sort of metallic 
beauty, firmly cut and embossed, like crowns of wild 
olive, of parsley and bay, in crisp gold. First, how- 
ever, it had been necessary that Greece should win 
its liberty, political standing-ground, and a really 
social air to breathe in, with development of the 
youthful limbs. Of this process Athens was the 
chief scene; and the earliest notable presentment of 
humanity by Athenian art was in celebration of those 
who had vindicated liberty with their lives — two 
youths again, in a real incident, which had, however, 
the quality of a poetic invention, turning, as it did, 
on that ideal or romantic friendship which was char- 
acteristic of the Greeks. 

With something, perhaps, of hieratic convention, 
yet presented as they really were, as friends and 
admirers loved to think of them, Harmodius and 
Aristogeiton stood, then, soon after their heroic 
death, side by side in bronze, the work of Antenor, 
in a way not to be forgotten, when, thirty years after- 
wards, a foreign tyrant, Xerxes, carried them away to 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 295 

Persia. Kritios and Nesistes were, therefore, em- 
ployed for a reproduction of them, which would 
naturally be somewhat more advanced in style. In 
its turn this also disappeared. The more curious 
student, however, would still fancy he saw the trace 
of it — of that copy, or of the original, afterwards 
restored to Athens — here or there, on vase or coin. 
But in fact the very images of the heroic youths were 
become but ghosts, haunting the story of Greek art, 
till they found or seemed to find a body once more 
when, not many years since, an acute observer de- 
tected, as he thought, in a remarkable pair of statues 
in the Museum of Naples, if freed from incorrect 
restorations and rightly set together, a veritable de- 
scendant from the original work of Antenor. With 
all their truth to physical form and movement, with 
a conscious mastery of delineation, they were, never- 
theless, in certain details, in the hair, for instance, 
archaic, or rather archaistic — designedly archaic, as 
from the hand of a workman, for whom, in this sub- 
ject, archaism, the very touch of the ancient master, 
had a sentimental or even a religious value. And 
unmistakeably they were young assassins, moving, 
with more than fraternal unity, the younger in ad- 
vance of and covering the elder, according to the 
account given by Herodotus, straight to their pur- 



296 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

pose ; — against two wicked brothers, as you remem- 
ber, two good friends, on behalf of the dishonoured 
sister of one of them. 

Archaeologists have loved to adjust them tenta- 
tively, with various hypotheses as to the precise 
manner in which they thus went together. Mean- 
time they have figured plausibly as representative of 
Attic sculpture at the end of its first period, still 
immature indeed, but with a just claim to take 
breath, so to speak, having now accomplished some 
stades of the journey. Those young heroes of Athe- 
nian democracy, then, indicate already what place 
Athens and Attica will occupy in the supreme age of 
art soon to come; indicate also the subject from 
which that age will draw the main stream of its in- 
spiration — living youth, "iconic " in its exact por- 
traiture, or "heroic " as idealised in various degrees 
under the influence of great thoughts about it — 
youth in its self-denying contention towards great 
effects; great intrinsically, as at Marathon or when 
Harmodius and Aristogeiton fell, or magnified by 
the force and splendour of Greek imagination with 
the stimulus of the national games. For the most 
part, indeed, it is not with youth taxed spasmodi- 
cally, like that of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and 
the "necessity" that was upon it, that the Athenian 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 297 

mind and heart are now busied; but with youth in 
its voluntary labours, its habitual and measured dis- 
cipline, labour for its own sake, or in wholly friendly 
contest for prizes which in reality borrow all their 
value from the quality of the receiver. 

We are with Pindar, you see, in this athletic age 
of Greek sculpture. It is the period no longer of 
battle against a foreign foe, recalling the Homeric 
ideal, nor against the tyrant at home, fixing a dubi- 
ous ideal for the future, but of peaceful combat as a 
fine art — pitlvis Oly7npicus, Anticipating the arts, 
poetry, a generation before Myron and Polycleitus, 
had drawn already from the youthful combatants in 
the great national games the motives of those Odes, 
the bracing words of which, as I said, are like work 
in fine bronze, or, as Pindar himself suggests, in 
ivory and gold. Sung in the victor's supper-room, 
or at the door of his abode, or with the lyre and the 
pipe as they took him home in procession through 
the streets, or commemorated the happy day, or in a 
temple where he laid up his crown, Pindar's songs 
bear witness to the pride of family or township in the 
physical perfection of son or citizen, and his conse- 
quent success in the long or the short foot-race, or 
the foot-race in armour, or the pentathlon^ or any 
part of it. "Now on one, now on another," as the 



298 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

poet tells, *^doth the grace that quickeneth (quick- 
eneth, literally, on the race-course) look favourably." 
^Apto-Toi/ v8(Dp he declares indeed, and the actual 
prize, as we know, was in itself of little or no worth 
— a cloak, in the Athenian games, but at the greater 
games a mere handful of parsley, a few sprigs of 
pine or wild olive. The prize has, so to say, only 
an intellectual or moral value. Yet actually Pindar's 
own verse is all of gold and wine and flowers, is 
itself avowedly a flower, or "liquid nectar," or "the 
sweet fruit of his soul to men that are winners in the 
games." "As when from a wealthy hand one lifting 
a cup, made glad within with the dew of the vine, 
maketh gift thereof to a youth:" — the keynote of 
Pindar's verse is there! This brilliant living youth 
of his day, of the actual time, for whom, as he says, 
he "awakes the clear-toned gale of song" — iiriojv 
oTjiiov XCyvv — that song mingles sometimes with the 
splendours of a recorded ancient lineage, or with the 
legendary greatness of a remoter past, its gods and 
heroes, patrons or ancestors, it might be, of the 
famous young man of the hour, or with the glory and 
solemnity of the immortals themselves taking a share 
in mortal contests. On such pretext he will tell a 
new story, or bring to its last perfection by his man- 
ner of telling it, his pregnancy and studied beauty of 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 299 

expression, an old one. The tale of Castor and 
Polydeukes, the appropriate patrons of virginal yet 
virile youth, starred and mounted, he tells in all its 
human interest. 

"Ample is the glory stored up for Olympian win- 
ners." And what Pindar's contemporaries asked of 
him for the due appreciation, the consciousness, of 
it, by way of song, that the next generation sought, 
by way of sculptural memorial in marble, and above 
all, as it seems, in bronze. The keen demand for 
athletic statuary, the honour attached to the artist 
employed to make his statue at Olympia, or at home, 
bear witness again to the pride with which a Greek 
town, the pathos, it might be, with which a family, 
looked back to the victory of one of its members. 
In the courts of Olympia a whole population in 
marble and bronze gathered quickly, — a world of 
portraits, out of which, as the purged and perfected 
essence, the ideal soul, of them, emerged the Diadu- 
menusy for instance, the Discobolus, the so-called 
Jason of the Louvre. Olympia was in truth, as 
Pindar says again, a 7nother of gold-crowned contests, 
the mother of a large offspring. All over Greece the 
enthusiasm for gymnastic, for the life of the gymna- 
sia, prevailed. It was a gymnastic which, under the 
happy conditions of that time, was already surely 



300 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

what Plato pleads for, already one half music, ixovcriKri, 
a matter, partly, of character and of the soul, of the 
fair proportion between soul and body, of the soul 
with itself. Who can doubt it who sees and con- 
siders the still irresistible grace, the contagious 
pleasantness, of the Discaholus, the Diadumenus, and 
a few other precious sur\dvals from the athletic age 
which immediately preceded the manhood of Phei- 
dias, between the Persian and the Peloponnesian 
wars ? 

Now, this predominance of youth, of the youthful 
form, in art, of bodily gymnastic promoting natural 
advantages to the utmost, of the physical perfection 
developed thereby, is a sign that essential mastery 
has been achieved by the artist — the power, that is 
to say, of a full and free realisation. For such 
youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within 
the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in 
the presentment of it there will be no place for sym- 
bolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful im- 
agination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of 
which is a large one, when art is dealing with relig- 
ious objects, with what in the fulness of its own nat- 
ure is not really expressible at all. In any passable 
representation of the Greek discobohis^ as in any 
passable representation of an English cricketer, there 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 301 

can be no successful evasion of the natural difficulties 
of the thing to be done — the difficulties of compet- 
ing with nature itself, or its maker, in that marvel- 
lous combination of motion and rest, of inward 
mechanism with the so smoothly finished surface and 
outline — finished ad imguem — which enfold it. 

Of the gradual development of such mastery of 
natural detail, a veritable counterfeit of nature, the 
veritable rhythmics of the runner, for example — 
twinkling heel and ivory shoulder — we have hints 
and traces in the historians of art. One had attained 
the very turn and texture of the crisp locks, another 
the very feel of the tense nerve and full-flushed vein, 
while with another you saw the bosom of Ladas ex- 
pand, the lips part, as if for a last breath ere he 
reached the goal. It was like a child finding little 
by little the use of its limbs, the testimony of its 
senses, at a definite moment. With all its poetic 
impulse, it is an age clearly of faithful observation, 
of what we call realism, alike in its iconic and heroic 
work; alike in portraiture, that is to say, and in the 
presentment of divine or abstract types. Its work- 
men are close students now of the living form as 
such; aim with success at an ever larger and more 
various expression of its details; or replace a con- 
ventional statement of them by a real and lively one. 



302 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

That it was thus is attested indirectly by the fact that 
they busied themselves, seemingly by way of a tour 
de forccy and with no essential interest in such sub- 
ject, alien as it was from the pride of health which 
is characteristic of the gymnastic life, with the ex- 
pression of physical pain, in Philoctetes, for instance. 
The adroit, the swift, the strong, in full and free 
exercise of their gifts, to the delight of others and 
of themselves, though their sculptural record has for 
the most part perished, are specified in ancient lit- 
erary notices as the sculptor's favourite subjects, 
repeated, remodelled, over and over again, for the 
adornment of the actual scene of athletic success, or 
the market-place at home of the distant Northern or 
Sicilian town whence the prizeman had come. — A 
countless series of popular illustrations to Pindar's 
Odes ! And if art was still to minister to the relig- 
ious sense, it could only be by clothing celestial 
spirits also as nearly as possible in the bodily sem- 
blance of the various athletic combatants, whose 
patrons respectively they were supposed to be. 

The age to which we are come in the story of 
Greek art presents to us indeed only a chapter of 
scattered fragments, of names that are little more, 
with but surmise of their original significance, and 
mere reasonings as to the sort of art that may have 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 303 

occupied what are really empty spaces. Two names, 
however, connect themselves gloriously with certain 
extant works of art; copies, it is true, at various 
removes, yet copies of what is still found delightful 
through them, and by copyists who for the most part 
were themselves masters. Through the variations of 
the copyist, the restorer, the mere imitator, these 
works are reducible to two famous original types — 
the Discobolus or quoit-player, of Myron, the beau 
ideal (we may use that term for once justly) of ath- 
letic motion; and the Diadume?ius of Polycleitus, 
as, binding the fillet or crown of victory upon his 
head, he presents the beaic ideal of athletic repose, 
and almost begins to think. 

Myron was a native of Eleutherse, and a pupil of 
Ageladas of Argos. There is nothing more to tell by 
way of positive detail of this so famous artist, save 
that the main scene of his activity was Athens, now 
become the centre of the artistic as of all other modes 
of life in Greece. Muliiplicasse veritatem videtur, 
says Pliny. He was in fact an earnest realist or 
naturalist, and rose to central perfection in the por- 
traiture, the idealised portraiture, of athletic youth, 
from amastery first of all in the delineation of infe- 
rior objects, of little lifeless or living things. Think, 
however, for a moment, how winning such objects 



304 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

are still, as presented on Greek coins; — the ear of 
corn, for instance, on those of Metapontum; the 
microscopic cockle-shell, the dolphins, on the coins 
of Syracuse. Myron, then, passes from pleasant 
truth of that kind to the delineation of the worthier 
sorts of animal life, — the ox, the dog — to nothing 
short of illusion in the treatment of them, as ancient 
connoisseurs would have you understand. It is said 
that there are thirty-six extant epigrams on his brazen 
cow. That animal has her gentle place in Greek art, 
from the Siren tomb, suckling her young there, as 
the type of eternal rejuvenescence, onwards to the 
procession of the Elgin frieze, where, still breathing 
deliciously of the distant pastures, she is led to the 
altar. We feel sorry for her, as we look, so lifelike 
is the carved marble. The sculptor who worked 
there, whoever he may have been, had profited doubt- 
less by the study of jMyron's famous work. For what 
purpose he made it, does not appear; — as an archi- 
tectural ornament; or a votive offering; perhaps only 
because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, 
at ^ any rate, the animal breathes, explaining suffi- 
ciently the point of Pliny's phrase regarding Myron 
— Corporu77i curiosus. And when he came to his 
main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the 
runner, he did not for a moment forget that they too 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 305 

were animals^ young animals, delighting in natural 
motion, in free course through the yielding air, over 
uninterrupted space, according to Aristotle's defini- 
tion of pleasure : — " the unhindered exercise of one's 
natural force." Corporic7n tenus cicriosiis : — he was a 
*^ curious workman" as far as the living body is con- 
cerned. Pliny goes on to qualify that phrase by 
saying that he did not express the sensations of the 
mind — anwii sensus. But just there, in fact, pre- 
cisely in such limitation, we find what authenticates 
Myron's peculiar value in the evolution of Greek art. 
It is of the essence of the athletic prizeman, involved 
in the very ideal of the quoit-player, the cricketer, 
not to give expression to mind, in any antagonism to, 
or invasion of, the body ; to mind as anything more 
than a function of the body, whose healthful balance 
of functions it may so easily perturb ; — to disavow 
that insidious enemy of the fairness of the bodily soul 
as such. 

Yet if the art of Myron was but little occupied with 
the reasonable soul {ani7?iiis), with those mental situ- 
ations the expression of which, though it may have a 
pathos and a beauty of its own, is for the most part 
adverse to the proper expression of youth, to the 
beauty of youth, by causing it to be no longer youth- 
ful, he was certainly a master of the animal or physi- 



306 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

cal soul there {anwid)\ how it is, how it displays 
itself, as illustrated, for instance, in the Discobolus, 
Of voluntary animal motion the very soul is undoubt- 
edly there. We have but translations into marble of 
the original in bronze. In that, it was as if a blast 
of cool wind had congealed the metal, or the living 
youth, fixed him imperishably in that moment of rest 
which lies between two opposed motions, the back- 
ward swing of the right arm, the movement /^rze/^n/i* 
on which the left foot is in the very act of starting. 
The matter of the thing, the stately bronze or marble, 
thus rests indeed; but the artistic form of it, in 
truth, scarcely more, even to the eye, than the roll- 
ing ball or disk, may be said to rest, at every moment 
of its course, — just metaphysically, you know. 

This mystery of combined motion and rest, of rest 
in motion, had involved, of course, on the part of 
the sculptor who had mastered its secret^ long and 
intricate consideration. Archaic as it is, primitive 
still in some respects, full of the primitive youth it 
celebrates, it is, in fact, a learned work, and sug- 
gested to a great analyst of literary style, singular as 
it may seem, the " elaborate " or ^^ contorted " manner 
in literature of the later Latin writers, which, how- 
ever, he finds "laudable" for its purpose. Yet with 
all its learned involution, thus so oddly characterised 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 307 

by Quintilian, so entirely is this quality subordinated 
to the proper purpose of the Discobolus as a work of 
art, a thing to be looked at rather than to think 
about, that it makes one exclaim still, with the poet 
of athletes, ^'The natural is ever best! " — to Se <^vu. 
airav KpaTLo-Tov. Perhaps that triumphant, unim- 
peachable naturalness is after all the reason why, on 
seeing it for the first time, it suggests no new view 
of the beauty of human form, or point of view for 
the regarding of it; is acceptable rather as embody- 
ing (say, in one perfect flower) all one has ever fan- 
cied or seen, in old Greece or on Thames' side, of 
the unspoiled body of youth, thus delighting itself 
and others, at that perfect, because unconscious, 
point of good-fortune, as it moves or rests just there 
for a moment, between the animal and spiritual 
worlds. '* Grant them," you pray in Pindar's own 
words, " grant them with feet so light to pass through 
life!" 

The face of the young man, as you see him in the 
British Museum for instance, with fittingly inexpres- 
sive expression, (look into, look at the curves of, the 
blossomlike cavity of the opened mouth) is beautiful, 
but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines 
which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the 
coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker 



308 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

might be; but that head does not really belong to the 
discobolus. To be assured of this you have but to 
compare with that version in the British Museum the 
most authentic of all derivations from the original, 
preserved till lately at the Palazzo Massimi in Rome. 
Here, the vigorous head also, with the face, smooth 
enough, but spare, and tightly drawn over muscle 
and bone, is sympathetic with, yields itself to, the 
concentration, in the most literal sense, of all beside; 
— is itself, in very truth, the steady centre of the 
discus^ which begins to spin; as the source of will, 
the source of the motion with which the discus is 
already on the wing, — that, and the entire form. 
The Discobolus of the Massimi Palace presents, more- 
over, in the hair, for instance, those survivals of 
primitive manner which would mark legitimately 
Myron's actual pre-Pheidiac stand-point; as they are 
congruous also with a certain archaic, a more than 
merely athletic, spareness of form generally — de- 
lightful touches of unreality in this realist of a great 
time, and of a sort of conventionalism that has an 
attraction in itself. 

Was it a portrait? That one can so much as ask 
the question is a proof how far the master, in spite 
of his lingering archaism, is come already from the 
antique marbles of ^gina. Was it the portrait of 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 309 

one much-admired youth, or rather the type, the 
rectified essence, of many such, at the most pregnant, 
the essential, moment, of the exercise of their natu- 
ral powers, of what they really were ? Have we here, 
in short, the sculptor Myron's reasoned memory of 
many a quoit-player, of a long flight of quoit-players; 
as, were he here, he might have given us the crick- 
eter, the passing generation of cricketers, sub specie 
eternitatis, under the eternal form of art? 

Was it in that case a commemorative or votive 
statue, such as Pausanias found scattered throughout 
Greece? Was it, again, designed to be part only of 
some larger decorative scheme, as some have sup- 
posed of the Venus of Melos, or a work of genre as 
we say, a thing intended merely to interest, to gratify 
the taste, with no further purpose ? In either case it 
may have represented some legendary quoit-player 

— Perseus at play with Acrisius fatally, as one has 
suggested; or Apollo with Hyacinthus, as Ovid de- 
scribes him in a work of poetic genre. 

And if the Discobolus is, after all, a work of genre 

— a work merely imitative of the detail of actual life 

— for the adornment of a room in a private house, it 
would be only one of many such produced in Myron's 
day. It would be, in fact, one of the prisice directly 
attributed to him by Pliny, little congruous as they 



310 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

may seem with the grandiose motions of his more 
characteristic work. The pristce, the sawyers, — a 
celebrated creation of the kind, — is supposed to 
have given its name to the whole class of like things. 
No age, indeed, since the rudiments of art were 
mastered, can have been without such reproductions 
of the pedestrian incidents of every day, for the mere 
pleasant exercise at once of the curiosity of the spec- 
tator and the imitative instinct of the producer. The 
Terra- Cotta Rooms of the Louvre and the British 
Museum are a proof of it. One such work indeed 
there is, delightful in itself, technically exquisite, 
most interesting by its history, which properly finds 
its place beside the larger, the full-grown, physical 
perfection of the Discobolus^ one of whose alert 
younger brethren he may be, — the Spinario namely, 
the boy drawing a thorn from his foot, preserved in 
the so rare, veritable antique bronze at Rome, in the 
Museum of the Capitol, and well known in a host of 
ancient and modern reproductions. 

There, or elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in the gen- 
eral destruction of ancient sculpture — like the "Wolf 
of the Capitol," allowed by way of heraldic sign, as 
in modern Siena, or like the equestrian figure of 
Marcus Aurelius doing duty as Charlemagne, — like 
those, but like very few other works of the kind. 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 311 

the Spinario remained, well-known and in honour, 
throughout the Middle Age. Stories like that of 
Ladas the famous runner, who died as he reached 
the goal in a glorious foot-race of boys, the subject 
of a famous work by Myron himself, (the "last 
breath," as you saw, was on the boy's lips) were told 
of the half-grown bronze lad at the Capitol. Of 
necessity, but fatally, he must pause for a few 
moments in his course; or the course is at length 
over, or the breathless journey with some all- 
important tidings; and now, not till now, he thinks 
of resting to draw from the sole of his foot the cruel 
thorn, driven into it as he ran. In any case, there 
he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling 
admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect 
naive fe also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to 
which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure 
of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this 
attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in 
the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, 
in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length 
of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn 
hair of the boy, arching formally over the forehead 
and round the neck, there is something of archaism, 
of that archaism which survives, truly, in Myron's 
own work, blending with the grace and power of 



312 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

well-nigh the maturity of Greek art. The blending 
of interests, of artistic alliances, is certainly de- 
lightful. 

Polycleitus, the other famous name of this period, 
and with a fame justified by work we may still study, 
at least in its immediate derivatives, had also tried 
his hand with success in such subjects. In the 
Astragalizontes, for instance, well-known to antiquity 
in countless reproductions, he had treated an inci- 
dent of the every-day life of every age, which Plato 
sketches by the way. 

Myron, by patience of genius, had mastered the 

secret of the expression of movement, had plucked 

out the very heart of its mystery. Polycleitus, on 

the other hand, is above all the master of rest, of the 

expression of rest after toil, in the victorious and 

crowned athlete, Diadiimenus. In many slightly 

varying forms, marble versions of the original in 

bronze of Delos, the Diadumenus, indifferently, 

mechanically, is binding round his head a ribbon 

or fillet. In the Vaison copy at the British Museum 

it was of silver. That simple fillet is, in fact, a 

diadem, a crown, and he assumes it as a victor; but, 

as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might 

be asking himself whether after all it had been worth 

while. For the active beauty of the Agonistes of 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 313 

which Myron's art is full, we have here, then, the 
passive beauty of the victor. But the later incident, 
the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a 
certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and 
work of Polycleitus. He is already something of a 
reactionary j or pauses, rather, to enjoy, to convey 
enjoyably to others, the full savour of a particular 
moment in the development of his craft, the moment 
of the perfecting of restful form, before the mere 
consciousness of technical mastery in delineation 
urges forward the art of sculpture to a bewildering 
infinitude of motion. In opposition to the ease, the 
freedom, of others, his aim is, by a voluntary re- 
straint in the exercise of such technical mastery, to 
achieve nothing less than the impeccable, within 
certain narrow limits. He still hesitates, is self- 
exacting, seems even to have checked a growing 
readiness of hand in the artists about him. He was 
renowned as a graver, found much to do with the 
chisel, introducing many a fine after- thought, when 
the rough-casting of his work was over. He studied 
human form under such conditions as would bring 
out its natural features, its static laws, in their en- 
tirety, their harmony; and in an academic work, so 
to speak, no longer to be clearly identified in what 
may be derivations from it, he claimed to have fixed 



314 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

the canon, the common measure, of perfect man. 
Yet with Polycleitus certainly the measure of man 
was not yet "the measure of an angel," but still only 
that of mortal youth; of youth, however, in that 
scrupulous and uncontaminate purity of form which 
recommended itself even to the Greeks as befitting 
messengers from the gods, if such messengers should 

come. 

And yet a large part of Myron's contemporary 
fame depended on his religious work — on his statue 
of Here, for instance, in ivory and gold — that too, 
doubtless, expressive, as appropriately to its subject 
as to himself, of a passive beauty. We see it still, 
perhaps, in the coins of Argos. And has not the 
crowned victor, too, in that mechanic action, in his 
demure attitude, something which reminds us of the 
religious significance of the Greek athletic service? 
It was a sort of worship, you know — that department 
of public life; such worship as Greece, still in its 
superficial youth, found itself best capable of. At 
least those solemn contests began and ended with 
prayer and sacrifice. Their most honoured prizes 
were a kind of religiously symbolical objects. The 
athletic life certainly breathes of abstinence, of rule, 
and the keeping under of one's self. And here in 
the Diadumenus we have one of its priests, a priest 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 315 

of the religion whose central motive was what has 
been called "the worship of the body," — its modest 
priest. 

The so-called Jaso7i at the Louvre, the Apoxyo- 
menus, and a certain number of others you will meet 
with from time to time — whatever be the age and 
derivation of the actual marble which reproduced 
for Rome, for Africa, or Gaul, types that can have 
had their first origin in one only time and place — 
belong, at least aesthetically, to this group, together 
with the Adorante of Berlin, Winckelmann's antique 
favourite, who with uplifted face and hands seems 
to be indeed in prayer, looks immaculate enough to 
be interceding for others. As to the Jason of the 
Louvre, one asks at first sight of him, as he stoops to 
make fast the sandal on his foot, whether the young 
man can be already so marked a personage. Is he 
already the approved hero, bent on some great act 
of his famous epopee ; or mere youth only, again, 
arraying itself mechanically, but alert in eye and 
soul, prompt to be roused to any great action what- 
ever? The vaguely opened lips certainly suggest the 
latter view; if indeed the body and the head (in a 
different sort of marble) really belong to one another. 
Ah ! the more closely you consider the fragments of 
antiquity, those stray letters of the old Greek aes- 



316 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

thetic alphabet, the less positive will your conclusions 
become, because less conclusive the data regarding 
artistic origin and purpose. Set here also, however, 
to the end that in a congruous atmosphere, in a real 
perspective, they may assume their full moral and 
aesthetic expression, whatever of like spirit you may 
come upon in Greek or any other work, remembering 
that in England also, in Oxford, we have still, for any 
master of such art that may be given us, subjects 
truly "made to his hand." 

As with these, so with their prototypes at Olympia, 
or at the Isthmus, above all perhaps in the Diadu- 
menus of Polycleitus, a certain melancholy (a pagan 
melancholy, it may be rightly called, even when we 
detect it in our English youth) is blent with the final 
impression we retain of them. They are at play 
indeed, in the sun; but a little cloud passes over it 
now and then; and just because of them, because 
they are there, the whole aspect of the place is chilled 
suddenly, beyond what one could have thought possi- 
ble, into what seems, nevertheless, to be the proper 
and permanent light of day. For though they pass 
on from age to age the type of what is pleasantest 
to look on, which, as type, is indeed eternal, it is, of 
course, but for an hour that it rests with any one of 
them individually. Assuredly they have no maladies 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 317 

of soul any more than of the body — Animi sensus 
no7i expressit. But if they are not yet thinking, there 
is the capacity of thought, of painful thought, in 
them, as they seem to be aware wistfully. In the 
Diadumenus of Polycleitus this expression allies it- 
self to the long-drawn facial type of his preference, 
to be found also in another very different subject, the 
ideal of which he fixed in Greek sculpture — the 
would-be virile Amazon, in exquisite pain, alike of 
body and soul — the "Wounded Amazon." We may 
be reminded that in the first mention of athletic 
contests in Greek literature — in the twenty-third 
book of the Iliad — they form part of the funeral rites 
of the hero Patroclus. 

It is thus, though but in the faintest degree, even 
with the veritable prince of that world of antique 
bronze and marble, the Discobolus at Rest of the 
Vatican, which might well be set where Winckelmann 
set the Adoraiite, representing as it probably does, 
the original of Alcamenes, in whom, a generation 
after Pheidias, an earlier and more earnest spirit still 
survived. Although the crisply trimmed head may 
seem a little too small to our, perhaps not quite 
rightful, eyes, we might accept him for that canoii, 
or measure, of the perfect human form, which Poly- 
cleitus had proposed. He is neither the victor at 



318 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 

rest, as with Polycleitus, nor the combatant already 
in motion, as with Myron; but, as if stepping back- 
ward from Myron's precise point of interest, and with 
the heavy disacs still in the left hand, he is preparing 
for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right 
foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, 
upon the business in hand. The very finger is reck- 
oning while he watches, intent upon the cast of an- 
other, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to 
lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the 
Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with 
a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, 
but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing 
certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any 
more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no im- 
pediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved 
just that, was the Greek's truest claim for furtherance 
in the main line of human development. He had 
been faithful, we cannot help saying, as we pass from 
that youthful company, in what comparatively is 
perhaps little — in the culture, the administration, 
of .the visible world; and he merited, so we might 
go on to say — he merited Revelation, something 
which should solace his heart in the inevitable fading 
of that. We are reminded of those strange pro- 
phetic words of the Wisdom, the Logos ^ by whom 



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 319 

God made the world, in one of the sapiential, half- 
Platonic books of the Hebrew Scriptures : — "I was 
by him, as one brought up with him; rejoicing in 
the habitable parts of the earth. My delights were 
with the sons of men." 



THE END 



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PLATO AND PLATONISM 

A Series of Lrectures* 

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IMAGINARY PORTRAITS. 

By WALTER PATER, 

Fellow of Brasenose College. 

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THE RENAISSANCE: 

Studies in Art and Poetry. 

By WALTER PATER, 

Fellow of Brasenose College. 

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APPRECIATIONS, 

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